How CRED is tapping AI to deliver premium customer experiences

Our Executive Function series features perspectives from leaders driving transformation through AI.

CRED is an India-based members-only club that rewards creditworthy individuals for their timely credit card bill payments by providing them with exclusive offers and access to premium experiences. Since 2018, CRED has built its brand on delivering seamless, secure, and beautifully designed digital products for India’s most affluent consumers. Today, over 15 million members use CRED each month. As the company scales, maintaining this level of quality has required new approaches to product development, service, and internal collaboration.

We sat down with Swamy Seetharaman of CRED to understand how the company is working with OpenAI to create premium, concierge-like experiences at scale.

CRED has always served India’s most discerning users. What motivated your shift to becoming an AI-first organization?

When we started, we were building for India’s most affluent households—a user base that expects trust, transparency, security, reliability, and exceptional design. These principles have guided us from day one.

But as we grew—more products, more teams, more data—it became harder to maintain context and move quickly without compromising quality. The question we ask is, how do we make every single member in every function be 10X? For us, AI has become a huge unlock in that journey. It lets us move fast and stay right, without sacrificing our core principles.

"The question we ask is, how do we make every single member in every function be 10X? For us, AI has become a huge unlock in that journey."

Swamy Seetharaman, CRED

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How has AI shaped the way you and your team approach customer support and product experience?

We wanted to move from transactional responses to empathetic conversations, which led us to build Cleo, our AI conversational companion powered by OpenAI models, including GPT‑4.0, GPT‑5, o3.

Cleo handles three common query types

What has the impact been so far?

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