From IVR to Voice AI Agents

Shubhrendu Khoche • March 11, 2026

A yufin employee in front of a sari-sari store.

Voice is a constant.

More than two decades ago, I had programmed Dialogic PBXs for Interactive Voice Response (IVR) calls during an industry internship with HCL Tech. I was fortunate to work with super talented classmates the next year, on phoneme-based clustering in our final year engineering project, for a word recognition system. Mathur, Gupta, Gupta, thank you!

Quarter of a century later, voice is still a constant.

We have launched our wAIs cart, the automatic basket builder using machine learning on yufin’s proprietary procurement and sales data of small merchants. We also recently launched the “photo of shopping list to basket” assistant for helping small business owners save time when ordering from their handwritten shopping list.

The team is currently working on optimizing delivery routes for our partner wholesalers and distributors so they can deliver at lower cost to more merchants in less time using the same delivery fleet and drivers they have.

But what excites me even more is the work our tech team is now doing on voice AI agents to make outbound calls, messages, and chat with yufin merchants with clones of our star human field sales ambassadors (FSAs).

Not to replace them, but to have them be present at more than one place, serving more than one merchant at the same time. Upselling, guiding merchants on promos and campaigns, pointing them to higher margin items to order and be their trusted partners.

The human in front is critical to building and nurturing trust with small business owners in emerging markets. But technologies like voice AI agents at their side will help us amplify their capabilities and make more small business owners into superwomen, with our “Super FSAs”.

Will the voice agents also crack a joke and share the personalities of our star field sales ambassadors?

Let us see what is possible.