December 10, 2018

Paytm forays into cloud with Alibaba alliance, unveils ‘Paytm AI Cloud’

The launch aims to automate cloud-based applications that deal with workflows, payments, messages and customer interaction, by leveraging AI.

AI Cloud

Months after announcing the deal, E-commerce payment company Paytm have unveiled Paytm AI Cloud for developers, startups and enterprises. With this launch, Paytm seeks to provide a suite of business-centric, ready to use applications to automate workflows, payments, messages and customer interactions by leveraging AI.

According to Paytm, enterprises need a platform that can seamlessly integrate customer engagement with payments and messages to understand the behaviour of these customers. They say that most of these cloud apps work in a silo which makes it difficult for enterprises to gauge customer journey.

By integrating and automating workflow, messaging, payment and interaction apps together on Alibaba’s cloud platform, Paytm say that they can easily design customers’ lifecycle, interaction points and offerings by leveraging AI. They also say that with Alibaba’s cloud and payment backing, Paytm can also compete with the likes of Zoho, Zendesk, Salesforce and Freshworks.

Paytm say that they have invested a total of USD 34.5 million in the cloud business after partnering with Alibaba. They further added that another partnership with DingTalk, wherein they have decided to facilitate conversations across e-mail, chat, call and audio conferencing is in the pipeline.

After launching their India data center, Paytm say that Alibaba Cloud are working towards securing IoT environments for enterprises across e-commerce, media, retail and gaming companies. They say that this deal with Alibaba will allow them to leverage this data center and provide payment services through methods like credit/debit cards, UPI, Net banking and Paytm Wallet.

Sujit Kumar Mishra, Vice President at Paytm believes that AI Cloud is the order of the day and any enterprise that is not updating themselves with this technology is likely to lag behind in the market. He also states that managing infrastructure becomes very easy since ideas and information get sandboxed and experimentation becomes much simpler without any added costs.

It will be interesting to see how Alibaba makes the most of this deal with Paytm, following rival Tencent’s data center launch in India a few months ago.