BPCL Launches Urja for Multilingual Customer Service
Bharat Petroleum introduced the Urja virtual assistant in 2021 to answer customer questions across its website, WhatsApp, and social channels. BPCL said the assistant covered more than 600 use cases in 13 languages, with non-English conversations accounting for more than 45% of interactions during the rollout.
Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited introduced Urja in 2021 as a multilingual virtual assistant for customer service. The launch was part of BPCL's Project Anubhav program to make digital support available across the channels and languages its customers already use.
One assistant across customer channels
BPCL's 2020-21 annual report described Urja as an AI-enabled chatbot covering more than 600 use cases in 13 languages. Customers could reach it through BPCL's website, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Google Assistant rather than navigating a single dedicated support portal.
The company reported that more than 45% of the conversations were in languages other than English. That measure is important because it indicates the multilingual capability was being used, not merely listed as a feature.
Yellow.ai, which supplied the conversational AI technology, describes the implementation as part of BPCL's effort to provide more consistent and accessible customer support. Independent reporting at the time also documented the launch and the same channel and language footprint.
What the deployment shows
Urja is an early example of a large consumer-facing company using conversational AI as a service layer across existing touchpoints. Its practical value depends on more than a language count: teams must maintain accurate intent routing, current answers, escalation paths, and monitoring for failures across every supported channel.
BPCL later announced a separate cloud and AI collaboration with Microsoft in April 2022. That partnership is useful background on the company's broader digital strategy, but it occurred after Urja's 2021 launch and is not evidence that Microsoft built or launched the assistant. Keeping those events separate preserves the chronology and attribution of the original deployment.
Key Points
- 1BPCL launched Urja in 2021 as part of its Project Anubhav customer-experience program.
- 2The assistant covered more than 600 use cases in 13 languages across web, messaging, and voice channels.
- 3BPCL reported that more than 45% of interactions used languages other than English.
- 4The later BPCL-Microsoft partnership is background and was not the Urja launch.
Scoring Rationale
The deployment demonstrates multilingual enterprise AI at national scale, but it is a 2021 implementation rather than a new 2026 product launch.
Sources
Primary source and supporting public references used for this report.
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