Aakrit Vaish: A Trendsetting Entrepreneur Building Ground-breaking Chatbots of 21st Century

Aakrit Vaish

“An Idea can help you to craft a great product, but people can help you to build a great company”, with this belief at the core, Aakrit Vaish, CEO & Co-founder of Haptik is marching ahead with full vigor and passion.  An Industrial Engineering graduate from the University of Illinois, Aakrit oversees all key business aspects such as revenue & finance, talent acquisition, and defining the strategy and vision for the company. He invests almost half of his time in recruiting the right talents, as he believes skilled manpower are the real assets for the company more than anything else. This budding entrepreneur always encourages a healthy environment in the office premises which consistently/constantly motivate the workforce to nurture innovation among them in order to excel in their job.
Aakrit always had a singular inspiration in his mind- to craft something that people would fall in love with and also value immensely. He always wanted to create a product that becomes indispensable for consumers and businesses alike. For him, creating something unique that a 100 people love and cannot live without is much more valuable, than creating something mediocre that a 1000 people say it is like a “sort of” product.  This inspiration and ideology led to the birth of Haptik, and within a very shorter span of time Haptik has become one of the world’s largest conversational AI platforms that build applications for consumers, publishers and enterprises. The company has been at the forefront of the paradigm shift from apps to bots, having worked across various chatbot use cases such as e-commerce, customer service, utility and lead generation. It has many prominent clients that include industry veterans like Coca-Cola, HDFC Life, Samsung, Sharekhan, Edelweiss Tokio, Goibibo, Tata Docomo and Amazon Pay among others.
In less than five years, Haptik has carved a solid and highly differentiated niche for itself within the market by creating great technology that translates into end-customer applications. They are more focused on catering to use cases that customers genuinely value instead of building “cool AI” for the sake of it. Their Haptik app is considered as India’s favorite personal assistant app that is available 24×7 to get customer’s work done over chat. This app has been downloaded by more than 50,00,000 people and is recognized among the highest rated app in India.
Hiring Right Candidate is the Key to Success
Any company needs infrastructure, finance, and astute leadership, but it cannot grow until it has the adept manpower on board. Destiny of any company rely more on its personnel than any other parameters. Haptik, thus follow a stringent hiring process, to filter the right candidates as they believe with having right people on the premises, no challenges can be insurmountable, and no goals can be too ambitious to achieve. For them, it is imperative to build a team that is ready to pull out all the stops to achieve a goal that has been laid out for the overall success of the company. “Many companies fail to reach their true potential because they don’t give enough importance to this function. Talent acquisition and retention are of paramount importance. Perseverance, faith in our self, and learning from own mistakes such that it cannot get repeated are also imperative to taste success for long,” asserts Aakrit.
Aakrit’s take on a Successful Leader
A good leader is one who sees an opportunity even in the challenging circumstances. Aakrit believes, there are many traits which a leader should have in order to succeed in this hypercompetitive globalized world and make their distinguished presence felt in the industry.  According to Aakrit:

  • A successful leader is one who believes in his team and is therefore not obsessed with micro-management. Giving people a sense of ownership and responsibility is important.
  • Being goal oriented and defining targets for one’s team is important. In the absence of a defined set of objectives to be achieved, people can easily feel disoriented and
  • Leading by example is one of the most pivotal traits of a good leader. One cannot inspire the team to be motivated, passionate, hard-working, creative and agile if the leader itself does not follow those things.

Future Goals and Message for Entrepreneurs
Haptik is very optimistic about their future. They will continue to work on their innovative streak to enhance their existing products for the greater client benefit. They are working towards building regional language support for their chatbots and are also in the process of launching a voice interface for it.
To enjoy a successful stint in entrepreneurship, Aakrit quoted “Start a company only if you are obsessed with the problem statement, not because you want to be an entrepreneur and not do a regular job. A business is a long-term commitment which you won’t be able to see through without passion and obsession.”
Source :-The 30 Most Powerful Men in Business

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