During an exclusive interview with Pulkit Ahuja, CEO & Founder at Proxgy, he states how the rise in digital technology has led to a monumental change in processes that were hitherto mundane and manual. By injecting a fresh lease of innovation, efficacy, and value-creation, the retail industry is virtually on the brink of a major paradigm shift. The technological advancements are creating and catering to a new customer demographic that aspires to be educated, entertained, and engaged during their shopping experience. The young mind also underlines that by combining IoT, AI, and Data Analytics with AR and VR, Proxgy has successfully introduced the next-generation of shopping experiences by blending e-commerce and visual commerce while also inserting a layer of customization.
TimesTech: What are the role of IoT, AI and NLP to provide a whole new experience
Pulkit Ahuja: The technological transformation that has ensued across the globe has seemingly redefined business operations, everywhere. Tasks which were necessarily arduous and mechanical have been become seamless and efficient, thanks to the relentless digitization of traditional processes. The emergence of new-age digital improvements like IoT, AI, AR, VR and NLP has revolutionized the B2C e-commerce space. Proxgy, in its capacity as a next gen visual-commerce startup, is offering a cutting-edge and futuristic visual e- commerce experience for customers around the globe.
By optimizing new-age technologies, our experiential discovery platform provides a number of assisted commerce capabilities that enables users to connect and access any physical place, destination, store, showroom, and property around them or halfway across the world in a vibrant and engaging fashion, all in real-time.
The amalgamation of live and assisted commerce has allowed us to offer “Everywhere-as-a-Service” (EAASE), by empowering users to stay safe at their place of convenience while their human avatars or Prox(g)ies shop for them, make them travel virtually, indulge them in live real estate viewings, connect live with them while they take the user’s car for servicing, or achieve generic tasks like running errands and live assistance. We are on the cusp of a breakthrough as we are strengthening our value proposition by extending a furthermore realistic and immersive experience to users by adding live VR and AR innovations that can impart an incredible visual commerce experience, This will prove fruitful in augmenting user productivity by helping them leverage a broader digital footprint that can effectively eliminate sundry needs such as travelling for enquiry, viewings, and conducting other business aspects.
TimesTech: Role of technology in resolving mundane human tasks
Pulkit Ahuja: The rise in digital technology has led to a monumental change in processes which were hitherto mundane and manual. By injecting a fresh lease of innovation, efficacy, and value-creation, the retail industry is virtually on the brink of a major paradigm shift. The technological advancements are creating and catering to a new customer demographic which aspires to be educated, entertained, and engaged during their shopping experience. By combining IoT, AI, and Data Analytics with AR and VR, Proxgy has successfully introduced the next-generation of shopping experiences by blending e-commerce and visual commerce while also inserting a layer of customization.
During the lockdown, numerous customers turned towards shopping as a retail therapy to soothe and comfort them. Therefore, the adoption of sensorial technologies which could vastly improve the overall user experience became an essential undertaking for us.
For users, Proxgy acts like a rich combination of Zoom call, Yellow Pages, and Uber functionalities that allows them to discover, connect, communicate, and transact with any seller, agent, or gig worker directly on-demand. For sellers, Proxgy offers several lead generation and live selling abilities, which helps them to address the virtual footfall effectively, by selling from any location across the globe.
TimesTech: India moving from digitization to automation post 2nd wave of Covid 19
Pulkit Ahuja: The unprecedented COVID-19 crisis led global businesses to time-travel “five years forward in consumer and business digital adoption, in merely a span eight weeks”. As social distancing norms became mandatory, companies rushed to implement digitisation and automation protocols.
In the Asia Pacific region, India proved one of the top three digital adopters for hardware, along with Japan and China. But when it comes to implementing software and automation, India features low on the list despite the fact that there are over 560 million Internet users in the country. The aversion to change is a sizeable factor that is affecting a number of organisations, especially the legacy companies. But the digital movement has gathered substantial steam and is on the verge of transforming every industrial avenue, as we know it.
Digitalisation actually entails creating and reimagining value propositions and delivering exceptional experiences to all stakeholders. At the same time, Indian businesses are also turning much more methodical in their ways of deployment. They also want to take advantage of every capability and feature of a product. The ‘Make in India’ sentiment is now inspiring people to create solutions in India integrating its people and expertise to deliver custom solutions to country specific problems through the available resources and recently deployed robust payment and security systems.
TimesTech: How technology in easing human tasks & ensuring safety and security in the society
Pulkit Ahuja: The evolution of video technology in itself has helped make society a safer and more secure place by proving to be a deterrent by the use of security cameras even in the remotest and most unpopulated regions. Other aspects of technology including easy video and audio communication has also made people more confident by enabling turn key contact with their loved ones ensuring their safety.
TimesTech: The significance of video commerce in coming years
Pulkit Ahuja: Visual commerce is inarguably the next big thing in the retail industry. With customers endowed with the opportunity to view in real-time the product they want to procure, the overall experience becomes much more personalized and clear. The novel visualisation function also aids in extending a superior, satisfying browsing and shopping experience to customers which is priceless for a brand, especially in the new normal. Visual commerce offers customers the complete access to a more definite and therapeutic shopping experience by actually exhibiting in real-time the product they want to buy.
Therefore, numerous companies are aiming to leverage the potential of visual commerce to communicate more effectively with passionate customers. Visual commerce will make way a more resourceful, efficient, and cost-effective marketing strategy in the future. Thus, it’s no wonder that visual commerce has accumulated such a significant traction in the industry. Its innovative concept and enormous potential are set to usher a profound change in the way consumers shop for goods. At the same time, it has also managed to successfully capture the attention of high-end brands while keeping a stronghold on consumers. As a brand championing the rise of visual commerce, Proxgy’s state-of-the-art visual commerce platform consists of gyro and joystick-controlled Smart Helmets, which provide a Stereoscopic 3D experience and 360-degree viewing options. The software includes in-house developed technologies, including ScrollView, StreamScroll, and UVCI (Universal Video Conferencing Identifier).
TimesTech: Five important video commerce solutions that will help ease monotonous daily work
Pulkit Ahuja: Proxgy aims to be the one stop shop solution for integrating video commerce in everyday lives of its users across all domains, be it shopping, real estate, virtual travel, enquiries, errands, etc. Apart from Proxgy, the technologies I see playing major roles in expanding and growing the video commerce solutions are Amazon’s Kinesis, Agora, Sendbird and Whatsapp shops.
