Nine of the top 10 e-commerce brands in India run on Gupshup: Salim Ali

In this exclusive conversation with AdGully, Salim Ali, Chief Marketing Officer, Gupshup, sheds light on his extensive experience in marketing and what led him to join the company at this crucial juncture. With over three decades of experience spanning multiple industries and companies like WordPress VIP, Avalara, and SAP, Ali brings a wealth of knowledge in building new solution categories, driving growth across global markets, and preparing businesses for multi-billion-dollar scale. His move to Gupshup aligns with the company’s mission to innovate through AI-driven conversational engagement and expand its global reach.

Ali discusses how Gupshup is well-positioned to become the de-facto platform for business-to-consumer interactions across various channels, including SMS, WhatsApp, Instagram, and more. He shares his vision for solidifying Gupshup’s market leadership through brand amplification, scaling demand generation, and fostering the company’s platform innovation, particularly in Conversational AI. Looking ahead, Ali outlines his priorities for building a global marketing engine that will drive Gupshup’s growth and position the brand as a transformative leader in the conversational messaging space.

With over three decades of experience in marketing, what inspired you to join Gupshup as its first CMO, and what do you hope to achieve in this role?

My broader experience has some unifying themes: building out and transforming a whole new solution category, accelerating growth across global markets, and prepping business for multi-billion dollar scale. I have seen this growth and scale play out in different flavours across companies such as WordPress VIP, Avalara, SAP and there is a clear alignment across these dimensions at Gupshup. Gupshup is at an exciting stage of platform innovation with AI, and accelerating global growth and expansion. We’ve had a remarkable growth trajectory and have always been at the forefront of innovation. The opportunity around conversational engagement with AI is huge – with brands across the globe investing in personalized 2-way conversation capabilities to accelerate marketing and sales.

From another, but equally important perspective, Gupshup is a very special achiever in the sense that it is probably one of the rare software companies that conceived, built and validated an enterprise-grade software offering in India, and is now taking it global, that is, it’s a beacon of Make In India through the software innovation lens.

We want to become the de-facto platform for business-consumer interactions across conversational channels, be it SMS, RCS, Whatsapp, Instagram or any of the scores of other conversational avenues. Our primary objectives in the medium term will be to craft and amplify our brand story, fuel business growth across global markets, and drive multi-billion dollar scalable demand through both direct and indirect channels. The potential to solidify Gupshup as the market leader who, in many ways, pioneered conversational AI engagement with our Conversation Cloud platform, is immense.

As Gupshup prepares for a possible IPO, what marketing strategies will you implement to drive growth, increase brand visibility, and attract investors?

Right now, we are evaluating all our options and laying the groundwork for when the time comes. Preparing for an IPO will demand careful strategic planning, seamless execution, and laying the foundation for scalable and predictable growth. We will focus on accelerating our product and platform leadership with Conversational AI, elevating Gupshup’s global brand presence, and putting in place initiatives to scale demand generation and customer marketing through ROI-driven storytelling.

Gupshup has been a first mover in the conversational engagement category, and we were the first to launch a full stack platform – the Conversation Cloud. It is essential that we effectively communicate our market leadership and vision, ensuring that both the customer, influencer and investor ecosystem recognize Gupshup as the leader in the conversational AI category. It is important to reiterate the innovation and scale of our platform, which serves over 45,000 customers. We serve a multitude of industries, and are able to bring best practices and use cases to help our customers grow. From a global marketing perspective, we are looking across people, process and platform vectors to support our growth. We will continue to develop and hire the best talent in the industry, build out scalable marketing programs with one of the most modern marketing and sales backbones around, and do so with significant automation.

We have an amazing story to tell through our customer portfolio. The growth and success of our customers and their stories are incredibly exciting and transformative. These are brands that every consumer and business will recognize and identify with.

How do you plan to position Gupshup as a leader in the conversational messaging space, and what unique value propositions will you emphasize?

Gupshup is already a leader in the space, and the recent launch of our Conversation Cloud platform certainly puts us way ahead in the league. Our solutions are used by over 45,000+ brands globally, including L’Oreal, Myntra, Netflix, Emaar Group, Citibank, among others, to engage with their customers, and drive business growth.

To put things in perspective and give you a reference point, our internal analysis shows that 9 of the top 10 e-commerce brands in India run on Gupshup, 8 of the top 10 travel companies, 8 of the top 10 fintech firms, 9 of the top 10 payment companies and 4 of the 5 biggest banks use Gupshup. This, as you can imagine, is rarefied air.

Picking up on what I said earlier, what truly differentiates Gupshup is the continual pace of innovation and leadership of our conversational AI engagement platform – the Gupshup Conversation Cloud. We are able to support all major conversational channels – be it SMS, WhatsApp, RCS, Instagram, among others, and our Conversational Cloud allows customers to facilitate journeys across their customer’s lifecycle: from awareness to engagement to purchase and post purchases, seamlessly across multiple channels. This allows us to help our customers orchestrate complete funnel journeys and automated campaigns for marketing, commerce, and support, all powered by Agents and AI-powered conversational capabilities.

My approach will focus on communicating the power and value of these innovations – on a global scale, and tell stories that resonate with brands across industries, showcasing our ability to enhance marketing, sales, and customer service with unprecedented impact and ROI.

We are not merely providing tools; we are transforming the way businesses engage with their audiences.

What emerging trends or technologies do you see impacting the marketing landscape, and how will Gupshup adapt to these changes?

Hyper personalization and AI are definitely going to have a huge impact on marketing at large. For marketers to stay ahead of the curve, they definitely need to utilize both of these elements in new ways. At Gupshup, conversations are at the heart of what we do. Therefore, personalization becomes even more important. Sending a message is often a one-way communication and the scope for the message to be personal is low. Gupshup can help brands curate a profile of their customer; who they are, and how they engage with the brands – across any marketing or sales touchpoint. All the activities done by a customer, whether interacting through email or social media campaigns, browsing through a page on the website, buying a product at a store or online, attending an event, redeeming a promotion, or engaging in a conversation on any conversational channel, are all data points that can be funneled through our Personalize engine. This allows our customers to create micro segments based on customer intent, behaviour, preferences and engagement with messages, and drive automated personalized campaigns with high effectiveness, and significant improvements in outcomes and ROI across awareness, re-engagement, commerce journeys, or assisted selling.

We have been at the forefront of AI innovations with innovations that allow brands to engage in new ways across the entire customer journey. With AI Agents handling inquiries, to automated journeys and campaigns, and seamless transition to human intervention, we make customer conversations a potent channel for our customers. Our ACE LLM is an umbrella of domain-specific Large Language Models specialized for addressing challenges in marketing, commerce and customer success with specialized industry context across BFSI, Retail, Hospitality, etc.

The AI Capabilities in our Conversational Cloud allow our customers to automate journeys and campaigns based on customer stage, with AI-powered automated language translations, AI generated creatives, optimized message delivery based on time, and inferred preferences collected over chat. We want to ensure brands get the best automated AI platform that can engage across the full customer lifecycle. We continue to refine and add more AI capabilities to make the experience faster, personalized, automated and deliver the highest ROI for our customers.

As a seasoned marketing professional, what leadership philosophy will you bring to Gupshup’s marketing team, and how will you foster a culture of innovation and creativity?

I look at Marketing through a 3-colour lens: People, Process and Platforms.

First and foremost, we have to nurture and bring together the best marketing talent across the industry. By best, I mean talent who truly understand the voice of the customer with deep insights on their needs, KPIs, and buying rhythm, and can communicate with clarity and full awareness of buyer, influencer and user personas.  Our team today runs fast with energy and urgency, and my job is to clear the runway and nudge the team on new approaches, automation and best practices that I have seen deliver compelling outcomes.

Secondly, we can drive incremental scale and outcomes with a specialized view of the marketing value chain from Product Marketing to Content Marketing to Demand Gen and Growth to Customer Marketing to Partner Marketing built on a strong Brand Marketing and Marketing Ops foundation. We also need to activate Value Messaging and ROI-anchored storytelling. This means matching talent to brand, messaging, creative, campaign, communications, and strategy needs with primary expertise, and then providing the space and freedom for talent to experiment, learn and stretch.

Thirdly, we need Automation built on a modern marketing backbone and tech stack. We should be continually innovating and seeking out new approaches and tech capabilities that enable us to craft, run, measure programs at scale. We need to be disciplined about measurement and outcomes with experimentation built into our DNA and modus operandi.

So to summarize, ensure that the best people are at Gupshup, guide and truly empower them to own the voice of the customer, and put into flight programs that are built on modern and scalable global practices, continually pushing the marketing and GTM envelope.

Looking ahead to the next 12-18 months, what are your top priorities for Gupshup’s marketing efforts, and how will you measure success?

We will be hyper focussed on building a marketing engine that can scale our global growth, amplifying our brand awareness and voice, and lighting up newer geographies. From a global footprint perspective, markets like Brazil, Mexico, and the SEA region with Indonesia and Malaysia, and Singapore are mobile-first economies with high messaging usage and are key geos for our growth. We are seeing tremendous traction in the Middle East, and will be further amplifying our marketing efforts there, and incubating new markets across Africa and EU.

The decoder for measuring success is very simple: brand and demand with the best talent in the industry. What this translates to is having a strong and bold brand narrative built upon our 45,000+ customer stories with an increasing share of voice. Secondly, we will deliver scalable and predictable demand from leads to MQL to SQL to Deals with the most modern and automated marketing backbone across the industry, and with best marketers who can make all of this happen.

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