Interview: Tata Communications on the Future of Orchestrated Business Messaging

May 2026

Telecoms & Connectivity

Molly Gatford

Senior Research Analyst

Tata Communications recently won a Platinum Award at the Future Digital Awards for its Kaleyra WhatsApp Business Solution, which enables secure, personalised, and scalable customer engagement on one of the world’s most widely used messaging platforms. To understand more, we sat down with Priyank Parikh, Vice President & Head of Global Sales, Customer Interaction Suite, Tata Communications, to explore how the business messaging landscape is evolving and what brands need to do to keep up.

How has the business messaging landscape evolved over the past year, and what shifts are you seeing in what brands expect from their communications and engagement strategies?

Over the past year, the business messaging landscape has shifted decisively from channel adoption to journey orchestration.

Not long ago, most brand conversations were framed around individual channels. The questions sounded like: “How do I launch WhatsApp?” or “Which messaging channel should we add next?”

Today, those questions have fundamentally changed. Brands are now asking: “How do I orchestrate messaging across WhatsApp, Rich Communication Services (RCS), SMS, and voice, based on real time customer behaviour and intent?”

This reflects a broader realisation that messaging is no longer an isolated touchpoint. It has become a core layer of engagement, tightly woven into service, commerce, and customer lifecycle journeys.

We’re seeing three clear shifts in what brands now expect from their messaging strategies:

• API first integration by default
  • Messaging is expected to plug seamlessly into Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Customer Data Platform (CDP), marketing automation, and commerce platforms. It’s no longer acceptable for messaging to sit outside the core digital stack.

• Demand for real time observability and control
  
  • Brands want delivery intelligence, routing optimisation, performance visibility, and the ability to adapt engagement dynamically - rather than relying on static reports or after the fact analysis.

• Security and compliance built in from the start
  
  • Particularly in regulated industries, such as banking, financial services, insurance, and healthcare, messaging must meet enterprise grade standards for data protection, auditability, and regulatory compliance - by design, not as an afterthought.

The most important shift, however, is philosophical. Messaging is no longer viewed as a peripheral marketing or notification tool. It is increasingly recognised as a strategic engagement capability - one that must be intelligent, integrated, and governed with the same rigour as any other critical business system.

As a result, brands are moving away from channel centric execution toward behaviour driven orchestration, where messaging plays a central role in delivering timely, contextual, and outcome focused customer experiences.

New capabilities such as WhatsApp Business Calling are reshaping real time engagement. How is Tata Communications supporting these developments, and what impact are they having on customer interactions?

This all reflects a broader shift in customer engagement toward real time, high intent interactions embedded directly within conversational journeys.

Customers increasingly want the immediacy and reassurance of voice, but without the friction of switching channels or repeating context. WhatsApp Business Calling addresses this by allowing conversations to escalate naturally from text to voice at the exact moment they add value, rather than forcing customers into a separate call flow.

Tata Communications supports this shift by enabling real time voice as a native extension of messaging journeys. With WhatsApp Business Calling embedded directly into WhatsApp conversations, customers can move seamlessly from chat to voice while preserving context, intent, and conversation history. There’s no handoff friction and no loss of continuity.

Partnering with Tata Communications, enterprises can combine messaging, calling, AI automation, and contact centre capabilities on a single platform. This allows brands to design controlled, outcome driven journeys, where escalation to voice is intentional, timely, and aligned to customer intent - not just a default fallback.

The impact on customer interactions can be seen as:

• Faster resolution and higher trust, as voice is introduced precisely at high intent or high complexity moments
• More personalised engagement, with agents and AI systems operating with full conversational context
• Improved conversion and efficiency, particularly in scenarios such as support escalation, transactional confirmation, or assisted commerce.

Together, these outcomes effectively bridge the gap between digital engagement and human interaction.

As brands adopt richer channels, such as WhatsApp and RCS, what tools or platforms does Tata Communications Kaleyra offer to help them streamline and speed up campaign creation and deployment?

As brands adopt richer channels such as WhatsApp and RCS, the bottleneck is no longer creativity: it’s execution speed and operational complexity. Campaigns today are more interactive, more regulated, and more tightly connected to customer journeys, which means traditional, manual approaches simply don’t scale.

With Tata Communications, the focus has been to remove operational friction while increasing the sophistication of what brands can deliver.

At the core is a unified orchestration layer that allows enterprises to design, launch, and manage campaigns across WhatsApp, RCS, and SMS from a single platform. Rather than treating each channel independently, teams can build journeys once and deploy them consistently across markets and touchpoints.

Several capabilities are critical in accelerating execution:

• No code and low code journey builders that enable marketing and growth teams to launch campaigns quickly without heavy technical dependency
• Rich media and template lifecycle management that allows assets to be reused, localised, approved, and updated at speed
• Prebuilt APIs and native integrations with CRM, CDP, and commerce platforms that allow campaigns to be triggered directly by customer behaviour and events
• Real time analytics and optimisation dashboards that give teams immediate visibility into performance and the ability to adapt campaigns while they are live
• Built in regulatory alignment that ensures messaging complies with local market requirements by design rather than through manual checks.

What makes this approach effective at enterprise scale is the dual layer operating model. Marketing teams gain speed and flexibility to experiment and deploy quickly, while product, security, and compliance teams retain the governance, controls, and auditability they need.

The result is faster time to market without sacrificing trust or control. Brands can move from idea to execution in days rather than weeks, while still operating with enterprise grade reliability and compliance. In a landscape where relevance and timing increasingly define success, that balance between agility and governance becomes a decisive advantage.

How is conversational engagement evolving across channels, and how is Tata Communications Kaleyra enabling brands to deliver personalised, automated experiences at scale?

Conversational engagement is evolving from isolated interactions into intelligent, continuous conversations powered by unified data and automation. Customers no longer judge experiences channel by channel; they judge whether a brand understands them, remembers their history, and responds appropriately in the moment.

What’s driving this shift is the convergence of four critical layers that were traditionally managed separately:

• Communication execution, across messaging and voice
• Customer service and assisted engagement
• Customer intelligence and behavioural data
• AI driven decisioning and automation

At Tata Communications Kaleyra, our strategy is to bring these layers together into a single, integrated interaction fabric. By connecting Communications Platform-as-a-Service (CPaaS), Contact Centre-as-a-Service (CCaaS), CDP, and AI intelligence, brands can move beyond scripted automation toward conversations that are adaptive, personalised, and scalable.

This enables a new class of conversational experiences, including:

• Behaviour triggered engagement, where messages are initiated based on real customer actions and signals
• Dynamic content personalisation, tailored to context, preferences, and lifecycle stage
• AI led conversational flows, with seamless escalation to human agents when empathy or judgement is required
• True cross channel continuity, which allows conversations to move fluidly between messaging, voice, and assisted service

The real innovation, however, isn’t automation alone: it’s context preservation at scale. Customers shouldn’t have to repeat themselves or re establish intent every time they switch channels. The system should understand their history, intent, and value, and carry that intelligence forward across every interaction.

That’s where platform integration becomes the decisive advantage. When data, AI, and engagement channels operate as a coordinated system, rather than disconnected tools, brands can deliver conversations that feel coherent, relevant, and human - even when they’re largely automated.

In this next phase of conversational engagement, success will be defined not by how many channels a brand supports, but by how intelligently it connects them to deliver personalised experiences that progress the relationship with every interaction.

Looking ahead, how do you expect brands to use rich, conversational channels, and where is Tata Communications Kaleyra focusing its innovation to support the next wave of use cases?

We believe rich conversational channels will move from supporting interactions to shaping entire customer journeys. Messaging is evolving from a communication layer into a transactional, decision making, and engagement interface - one where discovery, service, and conversion increasingly happen in the same conversational flow.

We see several innovation themes defining how brands will use these channels in the next phase:

• Conversational commerce at scale, where browsing, assistance, and purchase happen fluidly within chat
• Embedded payments and transactional workflows, which allow customers to complete actions instantly without leaving the conversation
• AI copilots for campaign and journey optimisation, which are continuously learning from performance data and customer behaviour
• Verified identity and trust layers across messaging, which ensure secure, authenticated interactions, particularly in regulated industries
• Predictive, cross channel orchestration, where engagement is proactively guided by behavioural signals rather than static rules
• Built in intelligence and analytics, which gives brands clear visibility into what’s working and why, in real time

To support these use cases, Tata Communications Kaleyra is investing in making messaging infrastructure fundamentally:

• More intelligent, with AI driven decisioning and automation embedded into engagement workflows
• More interoperable, so messaging connects seamlessly with CRM, CDP, commerce, and service platforms
• More secure, with trust, compliance, and identity built in by design
• More measurable, to enable brands to link conversational engagement directly to business outcomes

We believe that messaging will become the primary digital engagement interface for many industries - from retail and eCommerce to financial services and healthcare. As this shift accelerates, success will depend on how effectively brands combine intelligence, trust, and orchestration within conversational channels.

The next wave of differentiation won’t come from simply adopting richer channels. It will come from how intelligently those channels are connected, automated, and governed to deliver experiences that are relevant, frictionless, and outcome driven at scale.

Tata Communications is a leading digital ecosystem provider that powers today’s fast-growing digital economy. The company enables the digital transformation of enterprises globally, including 300 of the Fortune 500; unlocking opportunities for businesses by enabling borderless growth, boosting product innovation and customer experience, improving productivity and efficiency, building agility, and managing risk.

With its solutions-orientated approach, proven managed service capabilities, and cutting-edge infrastructure, Tata Communications drives the next level of intelligence with its cloud, mobility, Internet of Things, collaboration, security, and network services.

Tata Communications is part of the rich heritage of the Internet in India. Over the last 25 years, its enterprise-enabled services have been essential to the adoption of digital services in the country. From utility to transformation, connectivity is an essential fabric of sustenance for the economy.

For more information on Tata Communications' Kaleyra WhatsApp Business Solution, please visit the website. You can also connect with Priyank on LinkedIn.