By: Shawn Mars

“We believe that platforms like us can be more valuable because it’s your data and it’s the AI of your world — not the AI for the world.”

That quote from Sameer Narkar, Founder and CEO of Konnect Insights, illustrates the direction of enterprise customer experience in an AI-driven future: personalized, secure, and built on first-party trust.

On The Backstory on Marketing and AI with Guy Powell, Sameer shared how he built a global SaaS platform from scratch, why he prefers not to rely heavily on OpenAI, and how brands should reconsider omnichannel CX across regions.

From Finance to CX Intelligence

Sameer didn’t start in marketing. He was a finance-domain software developer before founding Konnect Insights in 2016.

“I didn’t come from a marketing background,” he said. “I was happy doing software for the finance domain… But when I started this company, we started developing a product which was for the marketing team and the customer care team as well.”

That product evolved into an enterprise-grade platform used by over 500 global brands to manage social listening, sentiment analysis, online reputation, and customer support—all with proprietary AI at its core.

Building a Secure, Proprietary AI Stack

Security is critical in customer experience platforms, particularly when handling data from telecom, banking, or healthcare clients. For Sameer, sending customer data through public APIs like OpenAI is not an approach he favors.

“With OpenAI and just passing data… it’s not a very scalable model,” he explained. “If we use OpenAI or third-party AI, at some stage we are compromising the data.”

Instead, Konnect Insights developed its own AI layer—leveraging open-source models like LLaMA, Google’s Gemma, and a few other models—to keep all customer data within the system.

He emphasized, “Your data never goes out of our system.”

While the development of proprietary models comes with longer timelines, the team remains focused on maintaining robust security and control. “It takes time. But more importantly, we have to offer strong security so that the data is not compromised,” Sameer said.

What Omnichannel Actually Means

For Sameer, “omnichannel” is not just a buzzword. It’s a real operational challenge that Konnect Insights strives to address.

“If there is only one channel through which a brand and a customer can communicate, then that would’ve been an ideal world, but people like us would not exist,” he said.

The platform integrates social media, Google reviews, email, chat, voice, blogs, forums, and even local platforms like Line and Viber. The goal: a single, unified view of the customer.

“Our objective is to gather all these channels and provide a unified experience for the brand,” Sameer added.

This centralized view allows their proprietary AI to surface marketing trends, suggest next-best actions, and flag churn risks—either for individual customers or in aggregate.

Adapting to Global Markets

Konnect Insights operates in 35+ countries and tailors its solutions to accommodate regional behavior.

“In places like Saudi, Twitter is huge… for a country like Egypt, Facebook is very huge,” Sameer noted. “If the data is not very large, then your use cases may not be as competitive. It’ll be more on the customer care side of things.”

The team creates custom benchmarks per industry and region, allowing clients to evaluate performance even in lower-volume markets.

“We create some benchmark reports, based on publicly available data,” he said. “That gives you insights on what’s really happening in different kinds of industries.”

Advice for the Next Generation of Marketers

As AI reshapes every part of marketing, Sameer offered clear advice to early-career professionals:

“AI really empowers us to do so many things. The challenge is how can we learn so fast,” he said.

He encouraged building internal communities where innovation can come from any level:

“The intern that you hire may be much more solid and experienced on AI than maybe a 35-year-old founder,” he said.

That mindset—humble, agile, and product-focused—reflects the same values that helped him build a 140+ person, bootstrapped company that’s reshaping enterprise CX across the globe.