When Utkarsh Roy and Divyaansh Anuj conceptualised Introbot, their goal was to build an AI-driven virtual community manager for various groups such as alumni networks, VCs, startups and the like. Little did they know that their bot would go on to become an integral part of Indian social media's response to the brutal second wave of COVID19. In late April, cases in India began peaking at an alarming rate and Roy himself was diagnosed with the dreaded virus. As he convalesced at home, he and Anuj saw how desperate the situation was. Indians were making fervent pleas and requests for oxygen cylinders, medicines, ambulances, and other vital supplies on social media platforms. This is when Roy and Anuj decided to put their initial plans on hold, and quickly repurposed their bot to help people get the resources they so desperately needed. 

The explosion of information, triggered by obvious panic to help loved ones, was creating a bigger challenge - collating and verifying information in real time. Several leads provided online were invalid, incorrect or simply not enough to help the next person. This prompted a clutch of entrepreneurs, technology experts and business leaders to come together to build CovidCitizens.org, which Anuj and Roy are part of. Other members of this group include Avinash Raghava, founding volunteer of SaaSBoomi; Chaitanya Ramalingegowda, Cofounder, Wakefit.co; Jasminder Singh Gulati, cofounder, NowFloats; Aditya Kothari & Ashwath Venkatesh, creators of Fireside; Suhas Motwani of The Product Folks; Ruman Agarwal, Cofounder and Chief of Product, Accio.io; Hemlata Varlani of United for Social Impact, Havinder Singh Minhas of Digital Futurists, Abheejit of Vruksh Ecosystem and atleast 350 other volunteers. 

Introbot is the conversational WhatsApp bot that provides verified information to those who need it. The process to get alerts is simple - a user has to add their number +1 (234) 517-8991 to their WhatsApp and send queries in a 'X in Y' format where X is the resource needed and Y is the location. For example - 'Remdesivir in Bengaluru'. The bot immediately sends you the latest verified lead along with a 5-point feedback - Helpful, Unresponsive, Out of Stock, Invalid, Remove. The user can respond with one of these five points to provide the status of the lead to the bot, and this feedback is immediately incorporated for realtime updates. So far, Introbot has 30,000 verified leads spanning critical resources like beds, medicines, ambulances and oxygen. When they first started on April 25th, they had about 300 research leads collated from different WhatsApp groups that they used to build the initial version of the bot. Within 2 days, more than 20,000 people began using the bot, which led the duo to plug into more groups and communities to mobilise information on resources. In a week, they responded to nearly 500,000 requests. "We're confident that we played some role in saving atleast a couple of thousand lives. We're here to help people in their hour of need and are grateful to have been given this opportunity to help as many people as we possibly can," says Roy. 

Even though the bot has been operational less than a month, Roy, Anuj and the entire CovidCitizens.Org team of volunteers have been clocking in 20-hour days nearly every day as they navigate new challenges. An effort of this nature is truly unprecedented, and the working dynamics have been changing. Roy explains, "Initially, we had to manage two major challenges - collecting leads and verifying them. Collecting leads was an organisational challenge but thanks to the tireless efforts of the nearly 400 volunteers with CovidCitizens.org, and through our partnerships with leading educational institutions like IIMs and ISBs, we built a database of 30,000 verified leads - which is now among the top 5 databases in India for critical COVID19 resources. The next challenge was verifying these leads. Not only were the resources dynamic but also in high demand. It was nearly impossible for our volunteers to keep calling to verify the authenticity of these leads. This is where we introduced a mix of human capital and tech. We got the bot to verify the leads, and started a realtime updation of the database through multiple incoming data streams."

The next challenge was their supplier network were getting bombarded with calls. This is when the team put in a load balancing system to manage supply and demand, and eventually developed a new group that only had resources of suppliers, also being updated in realtime with information coming from a multitude of sources like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp and other message boards. Eventually, the model has moved from being community-led to crowd-sourced through a Supplier Bot which takes in lead requests directly from users that gets vetted by the industrious volunteer team. AI has played an instrumental role in helping Roy, Anuj and their team scale their operations in record time, by executing data verification, crowd sourcing, load balancing in real time. 

Currently, Roy and Anuj are completely dedicated to growing Introbot and expanding on their initial goal of building communities. "The original vision of connecting communities with a layer of intelligence has eventually come together. This is what we designed originally. The second wave of COVID19 happened to be a fitting use case, and in the time of need, demanded our attention and effort." 

What started as an emergency response team has revealed the workings of a well-oiled machinery. The collective entrepreneurial experience that Roy and Anuj bring, in addition to the vast knowledge that the other members possess has led the team to believe that while the needs of the people may change over time, the vision to help people will remain for long. Those who were looking for oxygen and medicines last week, could very well be exploring counselling services to cope with grief and loss. Other needs in the horizon include health insurance, job assistance, skill support, family support services, child support services, telehealth and more. So, Roy and Anuj are exploring partners with whom they can provide a full-stack service for all those affected by COVID19. "One day, hopefully, people won't need our services. But until then, we want to help and support those in need," says Roy. 

This is exactly the kind of community camaraderie and support that Roy and Anuj were hoping to create an impact with. AI can play a pivotal role in mobilising these groups further. Roy says, "There are so many groups today - professional, personal, alumni networks, hobby groups.. these communities are already created. What we want to do is develop a layer of intelligence that can add more value to what these groups can offer its members and anyone else who wants to join. AI can process streams of information about groups, form connections, build insights and add immense value to the existing human relationships."