1Point1 Solutions Redefines BPM with AI-Powered Human-in-the-Loop Delivery

The fear is everywhere: AI will replace us all. Millions of customer service jobs will vanish overnight. India's massive BPM industry — built over two decades on the back of human talent — will crumble as machines learn to talk, think, and resolve faster than any agent ever could. But Akash Karnik, who runs global business across five continents for one of India's publicly listed BPM companies, has a fundamentally different take. "AI is not about human elimination," he says flatly. "It's about upgrading the human to solve problems faster." And the numbers from 1Point1 Solutions tell a more nuanced story than the doomsday headlines suggest.

1Point1 Solutions is a Navi Mumbai-headquartered, publicly listed BPM company that has been tech-forward since before "tech-forward" was a thing anyone said. First listed on the NSE in 2017 and more recently on the BSE in 2026, the company has spent the last few years aggressively expanding internationally — making three strategic acquisitions, establishing nine delivery centers across five continents, and building an AI-powered platform that's already eliminating 25-40% of manual tasks for its clients. Akash Karnik, as Whole-Time Director & Chief Executive Officer: Global Business, is the person who makes all of that actually work.

From India's Telecom Boom to Global AI-BPM

The origin story of 1Point1 Solutions is rooted in a time when India's internet and telecom revolution was just getting started. Remember those early Airtel ads — "wherever you go, our network follows"? Those massive media campaigns generated an avalanche of customer queries across digital, telephonic, and print channels. Someone had to actually respond to all those people, and 1Point1 Solutions stepped in to build the solutions that made it happen.

From telecom, they expanded into travel aggregators like Cleartrip, airlines, e-commerce — essentially any customer-facing enterprise that was scaling rapidly and needed sophisticated multi-channel support. The key differentiator, even back then, was technology. While competitors were selling headcount, 1Point1 Solutions was selling tech-enabled solutions.

The international push started in earnest in 2023 when 1Point1 Solutions decided to crack the North America market. Rather than choosing between organic growth and acquisitions, they ran both strategies simultaneously. The M&A team hunted for targets while the sales team built an organic pipeline. Over three years, they completed three acquisitions that brought in medical record retrieval capabilities, a banking and CX platform, and most critically, an AI technology stack through their investment in Texian.ai.

Does AI Kill the India BPM Advantage?

This is the elephant-in-the-room question that every BPM company faces today. India's entire outsourcing industry was built on labor arbitrage — Indian workers are cheaper than American or European workers. If AI can do the work without any workers at all, doesn't that make India irrelevant?

Akash's answer is characteristically direct: the labor arbitrage advantage hasn't gone away, it's just shifted. Building and running AI-based products and solutions in India is still significantly cheaper than doing it elsewhere. The cognitive assets — the AI engineers, the prompt engineers, the data scientists — are more affordable and abundant in India than anywhere else in the world.

But more importantly, AI on its own can't hold its ground across complex service scenarios. India's real strength is two decades of institutional knowledge about how global customers actually behave — their journeys, their pain points, their exceptions. That knowledge is what trains the AI. Without it, you're just deploying a chatbot that sounds smart but solves nothing.

The Integrated BPM Pitch: How 1Point1 Solutions Sells AI to Traditional Buyers

Here's the practical challenge: most BPM clients are used to paying per headcount. More seats equals more revenue. AI flips that model entirely. So how do you walk into a room full of procurement managers and pitch a solution that literally reduces the number of people they're paying you for?

1Point1 Solutions' approach is to lead with integration rather than replacement. When they sit down with a customer, the conversation isn't "we'll replace your people with AI." It's "we understand your human-intensive operations, we're going to layer our technology stack on top, and then we're going to use GenAI to clear out the low-hanging fruit while creating a more complex human-in-the-loop solution for everything else."

The result for customers is a lower total cost of ownership, a more evolved solution, and — critically — a competitive edge they can actually feel. They're not just cutting costs; they're getting a better service delivered through a smarter system.

The Numbers: 25-40% Task Elimination

When pressed for hard numbers on AI's actual impact, Akash doesn't shy away. Across 1Point1 Solutions' client base, they've been able to eliminate 25 to 40% of human-intensive tasks through a combination of GenAI, RPA, and digital transformation tools. That's not a theoretical projection — that's delivered savings.

But the key insight is that this elimination doesn't happen overnight, and it doesn't happen all at once. The first 20-40% of automation can be achieved in 90 to 180 days — these are the obvious wins where AI replaces simple, repetitive tasks. Getting from 40% to 50% takes another 6-8 months because it involves more complex processes that require maturity, governance approvals, and careful guard-railing.

And the pacing is deliberate. As Akash puts it: "We don't use a cannon to kill an ant." Each process gets the right level of intervention — GenAI where it fits, RPA where it makes sense, digital tools for document handling, and humans for everything that requires judgment.

Voice AI: How Close Are We to Full Automation?

The dream of a fully automated voice call — where AI handles an entire customer support conversation from start to finish — is closer than most people realize, but not quite as universal as the hype suggests.

For simple, low-complexity transactions, 1Point1 Solutions is already there. Akash gives a vivid example: a customer calls and says, "I want to fly from Bombay to London, but I have a 2-year-old child, I don't want a late-night flight, I want an early morning or evening flight." The AI takes all of those inputs conversationally, processes the constraints, and serves up booking suggestions. No script, no button-pressing, no "press 1 for this." Just a natural conversation with about 95% accuracy.

The trickier part is everything beyond that first layer. Multi-channel interactions where a customer has booked through an app, sent an email, and then called — AI can now connect those dots and tell the agent (or the customer directly) that it understands the full picture. Exception handling, refund processing, policy changes — these still require human judgment, but AI dramatically reduces the prep work so the human can make faster, better-informed decisions.

Hallucinations and Guard Rails

The accountability question around AI is legitimate. What happens when AI hallucinates? What if it starts issuing refunds it shouldn't, or makes promises the company can't keep? Akash acknowledges the concern but reframes it as a design problem, not an AI problem.

"If you have built the right prompt engineering, your chances of hallucination go down as low as zero percent," he says. The key is in the guard rails — understanding the industry, understanding the consumer base, building compliance layers, and most importantly, limiting what AI has access to.

The Multilingual Edge

Operating across five continents means dealing with a tower of Babel's worth of languages. But Akash dismisses language as a solved problem. "Language is a medium to communicate. Language is not a showstopper for AI," he says. Whether it's English, Spanish, German, Korean, or any of India's 13-15 major languages, the underlying AI doesn't care — it processes knowledge and intent, and the language layer is, relatively speaking, the easiest part to configure.

The harder problem — and the one 1Point1 Solutions has invested heavily in solving — is industry-specific knowledge. Airlines deal with bookings, refunds, and schedule changes. Banks deal with fraud protection, collections, payments, and due diligence. Each industry has its own unique logic, exceptions, and customer expectations. Mastering those domain-specific capabilities across multiple industries is what separates a real AI-BPM platform from a generic chatbot with a translation layer.

Will AI Kill the BPM Industry?

Akash's answer to the existential question is grounded in historical perspective. "It's the same paradox we had in the 1980s when computers were brought in," he says. "We had the same argument — will computers take over humans? That didn't happen." What did happen was an evolution. New skill sets emerged. New jobs were created that nobody had imagined before.

The same pattern is playing out now. Today, there are entirely new roles — prompt engineers, AI trainers, people who build and manage knowledge bases for machine learning models — that simply didn't exist three years ago. The skill sets are changing, but the need for human capability isn't going away.

What's really happening, in Akash's view, is a generational shift that goes beyond technology. Younger consumers don't want to talk to people for simple transactions. They open the app, type their question, and expect an instant answer. They'll only engage with a human when the transaction becomes complex. The technology isn't replacing humans against consumers' wishes — it's meeting a new generation's preference for how they want to interact.

Key Takeaways

• AI won't replace you — it will upgrade you: 1Point1 Solutions' experience shows that AI eliminates the mundane 25-40% of tasks so humans can focus on complex, judgment-intensive work that actually matters.
• India's BPM advantage has evolved, not eroded: The arbitrage has shifted from cheap labor to cheap cognitive capital — building and running AI solutions in India is still dramatically more cost-effective than doing it anywhere else.
• Start with the low-hanging fruit: Don't try to automate everything at once. The first 20-40% of automation is achievable in 90-180 days. The next tranche takes longer because complexity requires maturity and governance.
• Guard rails are everything: AI hallucinations are a design problem, not an inevitability. Right prompt engineering, limited access scope, and layered deployment bring hallucination risk to near zero.
• The real shift is generational: Younger consumers prefer AI-first interactions for simple tasks. The technology is meeting demand, not creating a void.

About the Guest

Akash Karnik (Akashanand Karnik) is the Whole-Time Director & Chief Executive Officer: Global Business at 1Point1 Solutions. A hands-on leader, Akash oversees global business across nine centers on five continents and has driven the company's international expansion through three strategic acquisitions in North America. He is responsible for the company's AI-powered BPM delivery model that integrates GenAI, RPA, and human-in-the-loop solutions across telecom, airlines, banking, e-commerce, and other verticals.

1Point1 Solutions is a publicly listed (NSE since 2017, BSE since 2026), AI-first business process management company headquartered in Navi Mumbai, India. Founded as a tech-led BPM provider, the company has evolved into a global platform with nine delivery centers across five continents, serving clients in telecom, travel, BFSI, e-commerce, and healthcare. Led by Chairman & MD Akshay Chhabra, the company offers CX management, trust and safety, finance and accounting outsourcing, IT solutions, and digital transformation services. 1Point1 has established itself as a pioneer in integrated AI-BPM delivery, eliminating 25-40% of manual tasks for clients through its proprietary technology stack.