Agora is strengthening its AI ecosystem by ensuring interoperability with leading LLMs, speech recognition systems, and text to speech technologies. In an exclusive interaction, Ranga Jagannath, Senior Director – Growth, Agora tells Bhavya Bagga, Business Reporter – Corporate, CXO Media that Agora is moving businesses from static digital interactions toward dynamic, real time conversational experiences by combining developer first innovation with an expanding AI ecosystem.
Agora operates in a highly competitive real-time engagement technology and conversational AI space. What growth strategies have been most effective in expanding Agora’s market presence across key regions, particularly in emerging markets like India?
One of the most effective strategies for expanding Agora’s global presence has been focusing on enabling developers and enterprises to easily build real time, AI driven experiences on our platform. By providing flexible infrastructure that supports voice, video, and conversational AI, while remaining open to a wide ecosystem of language models and speech technologies, we allow businesses to innovate without being locked into a single technology stack.
In emerging markets like India, where digital adoption and mobile first services are growing rapidly, this flexibility has helped organisations build scalable applications such as voice AI agents, virtual assistants, and intelligent customer engagement systems that deliver fast, personalised interactions across channels.
Another key element of our growth strategy is strengthening ecosystem partnerships and expanding the ways conversational AI can be deployed. Alongside supporting enterprise applications, we are also enabling AI powered interactions across physical environments through innovations like the Convo AI Device Kit, which allows developers and manufacturers to embed conversational AI directly into smart devices, kiosks, robots, and connected products.
This reflects a broader shift where AI is moving beyond traditional apps into real world environments. By combining developer friendly platforms, strategic partnerships, and new capabilities around voice AI and physical AI, we are helping organisations across regions accelerate the adoption of next generation digital experiences.
With increasing demand for real-time engagement and conversational AI tools, how is Agora aligning its product-led growth strategy to address evolving enterprise and developer needs?
Agora’s product led growth strategy is focused on empowering developers and enterprises to quickly build and scale real time, AI driven experiences without the complexity of managing underlying communication infrastructure. By offering flexible APIs, SDKs, and developer friendly tools, Agora enables organisations to integrate capabilities such as voice, video, and conversational AI directly into their applications.
As enterprises increasingly adopt AI powered customer engagement, this approach allows them to deploy intelligent voice AI agents, virtual assistants, and real time support systems that deliver faster, more contextual interactions across digital platforms.
At the same time, Agora is strengthening its ecosystem by ensuring interoperability with leading large language models, speech recognition systems, and text to speech technologies. This open architecture allows enterprises to design customised conversational AI solutions while maintaining scalability and performance across global markets.
By combining developer first innovation with an expanding AI ecosystem, Agora is helping businesses move from static digital interactions toward dynamic, real time conversational experiences that can adapt to evolving customer expectations.
As Senior Director of Growth, how do you approach balancing customer acquisition with long-term retention, especially in a technology ecosystem driven by rapid innovation?
Balancing customer acquisition with long term retention really comes down to making sure the value does not stop at the first interaction. In a fast-moving tech environment, you cannot just focus on getting people in the door, you have to make it easy for them to stay and grow with you.
At Agora, we think about this in a practical way. First, lower the barrier to getting started. A developer first approach, with flexible APIs and SDKs, means teams can experiment quickly and go live without a lot of friction. That helps with acquisition, but it also sets the stage for retention because our technology becomes part of what they are building from day one.
From there, it is about continuing to add value as their needs evolve. As companies scale, they want more capabilities, better performance, and the flexibility to adapt to new use cases. That is where ongoing innovation comes in. Whether it is conversational AI or voice driven experiences, the goal is to help customers keep building on the same platform instead of having to look elsewhere.
The ecosystem also plays a big role. Partnerships with CX platforms, system integrators, and AI providers make it easier for customers to deploy and scale, which shortens the time to value and makes the platform more embedded in their operations.
In the end, acquisition and retention are not separate efforts. If you get the experience right early on and keep delivering value over time, acquisition naturally feeds into retention, and that is what creates sustainable growth.
What role do partnerships and developer ecosystems play in Agora’s growth roadmap, and how are you strengthening these networks to drive adoption of real-time engagement and conversational AI solutions?
Partnerships and developer ecosystems play a central role in Agora’s growth roadmap because they help remove many of the technical and operational barriers that organisations face when adopting real time AI driven engagement solutions. Collaborations such as our partnership with Exotel demonstrate how combining Agora’s ultra-low latency conversational AI capabilities with robust telephony infrastructure can accelerate enterprise adoption.
Instead of integrating multiple technologies independently, businesses gain access to a unified ecosystem that enables natural voice AI agents across channels such as PSTN, WhatsApp, in-app experiences, and RTC (Real Time Communication). This allows organisations to move from pilot deployments to large scale rollouts more quickly while maintaining reliability and consistent experience quality.
Beyond this, we are strengthening our ecosystem through collaborations with AI and technology partners to expand the capabilities available to developers and enterprises. Integrations with partners such as Murf AI help power more natural and expressive voice agents, while collaborations with companies like MiniMax and Sentino are enabling more advanced conversational AI and physical AI experiences across digital platforms and connected environments.
Alongside these partnerships, Agora continues to invest in a developer-first ecosystem through flexible APIs, SDKs, and integrations with leading AI models and speech technologies. This combination of enterprise partnerships and developer enablement helps organisations experiment, deploy, and scale real time conversational AI solutions more efficiently across industries.
Looking ahead, what key trends in real-time communication and immersive digital experiences do you believe will shape Agora’s growth priorities over the next few years?
The most significant trend is the convergence of AI with edge computing. Processing data closer to the user reduces latency to near-zero, which is critical for natural, human-like dialogue in sectors like digital banking and healthcare. We are also seeing a shift toward autonomous voice agents that can manage complex workflows rather than just simple queries.
Furthermore, we anticipate a move toward multimodal, privacy-centric engagement. This includes seamless transitions between voice, video, and chat, supported by real-time translation and emotion recognition to break down global barriers. As enterprises prioritize data protection, our focus on on-device AI and privacy-focused architectures will be essential. Ultimately, the goal is to move toward proactive, immersive experiences that feel less like a tool and more like a natural interaction.
