Exclusive: Ola COO Pranay Jivrajka says technology is the ace up its sleeves

Last week, Founder of Indian ride sharing service Ola, Bhavish Aggarwal, was quite vocal about his thoughts on pitching domestic companies and had urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led Indian Government to promote Indian companies more than the foreign ones. But, Ola should not have much to worry about because of the technology it has been innovating since past three years.

Ola has grown leaps and bounds riding on its tech-based solutions to help drivers as well as customer to assure a seamless riding experience.
In an exclusive interview to Business Insider, Ola COO Pranay Jivrajka said how Ola was using technology to cater to customers as well as the drivers.

“Technology has been at the heart of building mobility for India. We have to constantly innovate to cater to more customers, bring down cost price by bringing more efficiency; increase driver and consumer experience; and create some sort of loyalty and engagement in the customers. There has been a lot of innovation and we have to bridge the constraints of the present infrastructure and ensure we give a superior experience,” Jivrajka told Business Insider.

Ola has been rolling out products to bring in more options in mobility in India. From Ola Share to Ola Play, the ride-hailing service is constantly working on creating an inclusive environment.

“Ola came up with its Ola Share three years back to cater to ever increasing need. Thereafter, we expanded services to auto, bikes, shuttles, etc and made the most of technology on the same platform,” said Jivrajka.

Ola is world’s first cab aggregator to provide in-car experience with auto connect wi-fi. This was the first thing in Ola innovation in-car experience. It introduced Ola Play, which focuses on entertainment.

Meanwhile, as there is not much in mobility space in India, there is always a threat of increasing competition from the foreign companies. Uber, which has vowed to increase its focus in India and rake in money, can pose a threat to Ola, which is number one in India, with its money might.

However, industry experts do not feel so. Experts say Uber hasn’t innovated and has only adapted to the market needs. It brought smaller cars in India and UberShare that are not innovations but market understandings.

This way, Ola has an edge as it can fall back on innovation.

“Ola Play is focussed on entertainment which has tremendous possibilities for developers to innovate and build on that. We are connecting the online world with the offline one. You will know who the customer is, the behaviour patterns, where is the customer going, what are the likings, etc. We can actually put things in the right context that are relevant for the user. That is a powerful platform that we will see flourishing in next quarters,” said Jivrajka.

“Ola Play involves some amount of configuration changes and installations in the car. We are further ramping it up, for now we have it in three cities-Mumbai, Delhi and Bengaluru as we have few cars in Prime category and the experience is magical. We are working in integrating partners and building more features at some point of time. Apple is already live; we will have best partners in the world for Ola Play. Apple Music, Sony entertainment, etc,” he added.

Talking about tech investments, Jivrajka said more than 1000 people work in tech engineering, product and data enhancement, who are working to build solutions.

“Tech has a significant play in being where we are. And all these innovations have helped us in leading market. We have been doing this since 5-6 years. Tech is going to drive consumer experience,” said Jivrajka.