Tata Communications is betting that India’s 63 Mn-odd micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) and early-stage startups will become the next growth market, as more and more telecom operators look to position themselves as AI infrastructure providers and beyond cloud-based telephony and telecommunication services.  

Months after acquiring AI startup Commotion, the telecom giant has unveiled its first AI product, a voice AI platform developed along with Tata Tele Business Services (TTBS), targeted at small and medium businesses (SMBs).

The launch marks the first offering under the Tata Group’s efforts to build a unified AI infrastructure and product suite for businesses. 

Banking on their combined technical expertise, customer base and brand pull, the two companies believe that SMB adoption of AI services will become the next big battlefront for AI infrastructure providers in the domestic market.   

The voice AI agents, powered by Commotion, are assigned dedicated business phone numbers and can perform tasks such as answering customer enquiries, scheduling appointments, processing orders, sending follow-ups and providing customer support. 

Tata is pitching this as a conversational AI product, in which queries are answered with the lowest latency, highest word accuracy, with human-like interactions. The agents can handle interruptions and follow-up questions just like a human customer service agent, the company claimed, deliberately positioning this as different from other AI-powered contact centres.  

During the launch, the two companies said the platform is designed to make conversational and voice AI adoption easier for SMBs by integrating Tata Communications’ AI capabilities with TTBS’ customer reach and communications infrastructure. 

The infrastructure will be hosted on the company’s Vayu AI Cloud infra. The underlying telephony and connectivity infrastructure is provided by TTBS, while the platform integrates the AI, cloud and communications capabilities of both companies. 

TTBS provides connectivity, cloud and managed services to 50,000 SMBs through its direct sales and channel partner network as well as its digital marketplace for B2B tools and applications.

Despite the SMB focus, the companies are pushing the tech and AI envelope as far as possible. Tata plans to offer different deployment models, including pre-built AI agents as well as access to the underlying AI infrastructure, depending on customer requirements. The solution has already been rolled out to 600-800 customers in the launch phase. 

“Our focus is on making AI easy to buy, deploy and scale for SMBs. Rather than charging on a per-minute basis, we will price the platform based on the outcome of different AI agents,” Ganesh Lakshminarayanan, MD & CEO, Tata Communications, told Inc42, on the sidelines of the launch in Mumbai.  

The subscription-based and outcome-linked pricing will potentially reduce the burden on customers of complexities related to GPU costs and token economics. To be noted, Lakshminarayanan took charge of the office at the beginning of June 2026. 

When asked about the future roadmap, he said that the success of the voice AI platform in India will guide the company. Tata Communications is also considering extending the offering to SMBs outside India through partnerships, if the India strategy takes off. 

Tata Communications has steadily expanded its artificial intelligence strategy over the past years by investing across AI infrastructure, cloud platforms and enterprise applications. In July 2024, the company partnered with NVIDIA to build AI cloud infrastructure in India, announcing plans to deploy one of the country’s largest NVIDIA Hopper GPU-based cloud supercomputers, followed by Blackwell GPUs in a second phase. 

The partnership also brings NVIDIA’s AI software stack including its inference microservices solutions — Omniverse and Isaac — into Tata Communications’ enterprise cloud offerings, enabling customers to build, train and deploy AI models.

The infrastructure forms the foundation of Vayu, Tata Communications’ AI cloud platform, which was launched last year. Vayu integrates GPU-as-a-Service, an AI creator studio, data management and cloud connectivity into a single platform. 

It is designed to provide enterprises with on-demand access to high-performance GPUs while reducing the complexity of managing AI workloads across cloud and edge environments. The same will be extended for SMBs in a customised manner. 

Over the years, Tata Communications has invested significantly in AI infrastructure, cloud and connectivity, and with the launch of the voice AI platform, the idea is to drive utilisation through real business applications, and, of course, revenue. 

Lakshminarayanan added, “As we scale this platform across our customers, it expands the opportunity for us to monetise the technology stack we have built. As more AI agents are deployed, the value of our underlying infrastructure will continue to grow.”

Small and medium businesses are a critical pillar of India’s economy, contributing around 30% to the country’s GDP and employing nearly 380 Mn people. Despite this economic significance, AI adoption among SMBs remains relatively low compared to large enterprises. Even among enterprises, AI adoption is only growing seriously in the past year, and SMBs typically trail larger companies when it comes to technology adoption.  

Jaspreet Bindra, cofounder of consulting company AI&Beyond, said SMBs face four key hurdles in adopting AI: high costs, uncertain ROI, limited in-house AI expertise, unstructured data and concerns around reliability. “For SMBs, AI has to be easy to buy, configure and deploy,” he said, adding that businesses want solutions that work with minimal technical effort.

Tata is not the first telco attempting to bridge this gap, and it’s a crowded market with many different kinds of players. Telcos, cloud providers and conversational AI startups have introduced AI tools aimed at SMBs over the past few years. 

Among enterprise telecom operators, Bharti Airtel has expanded its cloud and CPaaS (communications platform-as-a-service) offerings through Airtel IQ, which enables businesses to deploy AI-powered voice bots, customer support automation and conversational workflows. 

Reliance Jio is also building AI capabilities through Jio Platforms, leveraging its cloud infrastructure and partnerships

Cloud communications providers such as Exotel, Ozonetel and Knowlarity already offer AI-powered voice bots for customer support, lead qualification, appointment booking and collections. 

Their platforms integrate with enterprise CRM systems and increasingly use LLMs to deliver customer interactions. Meanwhile, conversational AI companies such as Yellow.ai, Gupshup and CoRover have expanded beyond chatbots into voice AI, offering industry-specific agents for sectors including banking, healthcare, retail and travel.

Voice AI has emerged as the most accessible entry point, allowing businesses to automate customer interactions without requiring large upfront investments or significant changes to existing workflows. 

“Most SMBs already rely on phone calls to handle customer enquiries, bookings, and support, so businesses do not need to change how they operate. Instead of building new systems, they can add AI to their existing communication channel and automate repetitive interactions from day one,” said Pushpendra Kumar Choudhary, associate at public policy think tank Nation First Policy Research and Change Foundation (NFPRC).

The market for AI-powered voice agents targeting SMBs has become increasingly competitive, with telecom operators, cloud providers and AI startups all vying for a share of the growing enterprise AI market. While many are chasing enterprise accounts, Tata is betting that broadening the SMB adoption base will be the key to tap the long-underserved long-tail of the Indian economy. 

[Edited by Nikhil Subramaniam]

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