There’s a problem most brands don’t talk about openly: they’re talking at customers, not with them. 

Vikram Raichura noticed this long before he built Helo.ai. Through his work at VivaConnect, he spent years helping large brands send messages at scale, SMS blasts, push notifications, and bulk campaigns. The infrastructure worked. The reach was there. But somewhere along the way, it started feeling like shouting into a crowd and hoping someone shouted back. 

That nagging feeling eventually became a company. 

The moment things stopped making sense

Here’s what Raichura kept seeing: brands were investing heavily in more channels  WhatsApp, email, Instagram DMs, retargeting ads but customers weren’t feeling more connected. They were feeling more bombarded.

The problem wasn’t reach. It was relevance.

Think about how a real customer actually behaves. They might stumble across a brand on Instagram, spend twenty minutes on the website, abandon their cart, ignore three follow-up emails, randomly respond to a WhatsApp message three weeks later, and finally buy through a retargeting ad.That journey is messy, nonlinear, and deeply human.

Legacy engagement systems weren’t built for that. They were built for a world where customers followed predictable paths and that world doesn’t really exist anymore.

We kept helping brands get louder. More channels, more messages, more reach. But the brands actually winning weren’t the loudest — they were the most relevant. That’s what we set out to build. — Vikram Raichura 

So what’s different about Helo.ai ?

The honest answer is: the philosophy.

Most companies bolt AI onto an existing product and call it a transformation. Helo.ai  was designed the other way around, starting from AI and building outward. That might sound like a small distinction, but it changes everything about how the platform actually functions.

Instead of a brand deciding “we’ll send this segment a discount email on Tuesday,” Helo.ai  is built to read signals in real time. What is this customer actually doing right now? What do they seem to want? What’s the right moment and the right message to show up?

The shift Raichura describes is from campaign thinking to conversation thinking. Campaigns are about broadcasting. Conversations are about listening first.

Why this matters more now than ever 

There’s a reason this company exists in 2026 and not 2014.Two things had to be true simultaneously: customers had to change their expectations, and the technology had to catch up. 

Both happened. 

Customers today, especially younger ones, don’t distinguish between channels the way marketers do. They don’t think “I’ll use the app for this and email for that.” They just expect the brand to know them, remember them, and meet them wherever they happen to be. When that doesn’t happen, they notice. And they leave. 

At the same time, the combination of large language models, real-time data processing, and smarter automation has finally made it possible to personalize at the kind of scale that used to require an army of people or a lot of compromises.

Helo.ai  sits at that intersection.

The bigger bet 

“Efficiency is easy to measure. Relevance is harder — but it’s what actually builds a relationship between a brand and a customer over time. That’s what we’re optimising for.” — Vikram Raichura What Raichura is ultimately building toward is a future where AI becomes the invisible connective tissue between all of a brand’s touchpoints. Not replacing the channels, but making them feel coherent. Not eliminating human decisions, but making sure those decisions land at the right moment.

The goal, as he frames it, isn’t efficiency for its own sake. Efficiency is easy to measure. Relevance is harder  but it’s what actually builds a relationship between a brand and a customer over time.

Whether Helo.ai becomes the platform that delivers on that vision remains to be seen. But the question it’s asking is exactly the right one: in a world where every brand can reach you instantly, what does it actually take to matter?

That’s the problem Vikram Raichura is trying to solve. And it’s a much harder and more interesting  problem than simply sending more messages.

Interview By : Kashish Srivastava