In this insightful interview, Gurpal Singh, Chief Operating Officer at Startek, shares his expert views on how artificial intelligence is reshaping the customer experience (CX) landscape. He discusses the role of voice AI, intelligent automation, and multilingual models like DeepSeek in transforming traditional BPO operations. Gurpal also emphasizes Startek’s strong focus on data privacy and compliance, highlighting how the company balances innovation with trust and security. Here’s a breakdown of the conversation.
Who is Gurpal Singh?
Gurpal Singh is the Global Chief Operating Officer (COO) at Startek, a global customer experience (CX) solutions provider. With over three decades of experience in the industry, he has been instrumental in driving Startek’s growth and innovation. Under his leadership, Startek has expanded its global footprint, including the acquisition of Intelling Ltd to enhance CX capabilities in the UK market. His leadership has been recognized in the industry, with accolades such as being named one of the “10 Most Inspiring COOs of 2021” by Industry Era. Singh continues to share insights on CX transformation, digital innovation, and operational excellence through various platforms.
Q1. How is AI reshaping the future of customer experience (CX) in the Indian BPO industry?
Gurpal: AI is fundamentally reshaping the customer experience landscape across the Indian BPO sector. It is enabling organizations to transition from reactive support models to predictive and proactive engagement. By leveraging AI to analyze large datasets in real time, businesses are now able to anticipate customer intent, automate routine inquiries and deliver hyper-personalized experiences across channels.
This shift is also driving significant improvements in operational efficiency—reducing response times, minimizing errors and lowering the overall cost to serve. More importantly, AI is empowering frontline agents by handling repetitive tasks and enabling them to focus on high-value emotionally complex interactions, enhancing both customer and employee satisfaction.
With growing access to scalable AI models, Indian BPOs are becoming strategic CX partners for global enterprises, delivering not just support but business value through data-led insights and intelligent automation.
Q2. What industries are seeing the biggest impact of AI-driven customer interactions in India?
Gurpal: AI is driving significant transformation across multiple sectors in India, particularly in industries with high volumes of transactional or content-driven interactions.
Sectors such as e-commerce, digital platforms and content creation are leading the adoption curve. In these industries, AI is automating tasks like content moderation, content scraping and auditing—improving turnaround times, ensuring compliance and lowering costs.
Beyond digital-first players, traditional sectors such as telecom, banking and financial services (BFSI) and travel are also integrating AI to enhance customer service. In these industries, AI is used to handle closed-ended, information-led queries including balance inquiries, ticket booking confirmations and service activations through intelligent virtual assistants, chatbots and voice AI tools.
This not only streamlines service delivery but also improves customer satisfaction while allowing human agents to manage more complex interactions. Across the board, businesses are leveraging AI to gain operational agility, improve accuracy and enhance the overall quality of customer experience.
Q3. How does Startek ensure data privacy and security in AI-powered customer interactions?
Gurpal: At Startek, data privacy and security are integral to how we design and deliver AI-powered solutions. We operate with a comprehensive multi-layered security framework that includes end-to-end encryption, role-based access controls, secure cloud infrastructure and continuous monitoring.
We are fully aligned with global compliance standards such as GDPR, HIPAA, ISO 27001 and SOC 2, and our AI systems undergo rigorous testing to ensure transparency, fairness and explainability in their outcomes. Startek also conducts regular internal audits and training to ensure that our teams remain current on emerging cybersecurity risks and best practices.
In a market like India, where data localization and regulatory landscapes are evolving, we proactively align our infrastructure and governance to meet future requirements—ensuring our clients’ data always remains protected and compliant.
Q4. What challenges do companies face when implementing AI in customer service, and how can they overcome them?
Gurpal: Organizations across sectors often face several key challenges when integrating AI into customer service operations. These include unclear AI strategies, fragmented or unstructured data, lack of internal readiness and underestimation of change management needs. There’s also a common misconception that AI is a one-size-fits-all solution or a replacement for human interaction.
To overcome these challenges, companies must adopt a phased and purpose-driven approach. This begins with identifying the right use cases, ensuring clean and accessible data and defining success metrics aligned with business objectives. Building cross-functional teams and fostering a culture of continuous learning is also critical.
Strong governance, ethical AI design and proactive employee reskilling can further support seamless implementation. Importantly, organizations must see AI not just as a tool but as a long-term investment that needs alignment with both customer expectations and enterprise goals.
Q5. What are Startek’s key growth, expansion and channel plans for the coming years?
Gurpal: Startek’s growth strategy is underpinned by three core pillars: digital transformation, geographic expansion and industry-specific innovation.
On the digital front, we are investing heavily in AI, analytics, automation and cloud-based solutions to help our clients move beyond traditional BPO and toward integrated CX transformation. Our delivery model combines automation with human expertise, allowing us to support complex global operations at scale.
In addition to organic growth, we are actively pursuing inorganic expansion through strategic acquisitions that align with our digital-first vision and extend our capabilities in high-growth sectors and markets. This enables us to accelerate innovation, expand our service portfolio and onboard specialized talent.
Geographically, we are strengthening our presence with new multilingual delivery centers in India and exploring new sites in Africa and Latin America to support clients looking for nearshore and diversified delivery options. These locations will further enhance our ability to offer round-the-clock services and culturally relevant CX solutions.
From a channel perspective, we are enhancing our capabilities in voice AI, chatbots, social CX and digital self-service, ensuring omnichannel engagement across every customer touchpoint. Our vertical strategy includes tailored solutions for high-growth sectors like healthcare, BFSI, telecom and e-commerce where we are building specialized offerings to deliver deeper domain value and measurable outcomes.
Q6. How do you see the evolution of DeepSeek AI solutions in recent months? Are you planning to use this revolutionary low-cost technology in your solutions?
Gurpal: Open-source AI platforms like DeepSeek have generated strong interest in recent months due to their cost efficiency, scalability and multilingual capabilities. These models offer significant potential, particularly for businesses looking to support regional languages, enable real-time interaction at scale or experiment with rapid AI prototyping.
From an industry standpoint, such technologies are helping democratize AI adoption, especially among smaller enterprises or in markets with constrained budgets. However, integrating them into enterprise environments still requires careful evaluation in terms of data privacy, security, integration readiness and performance benchmarks.
While Startek continuously monitors advancements like DeepSeek through our internal innovation labs, our priority remains delivering enterprise-grade solutions that are secure, scalable and aligned with client-specific requirements. If such platforms prove viable for high-impact CX scenarios, we would consider them as part of our larger digital-first transformation roadmap.
Source: Digital Terminal