ABP Live has featured Exei’s Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder, Mr. Sunil Yadav, in “Excellence in Action: Leaders Making a Difference Across Sectors”, published on 24 October 2026. The piece looks at leaders working in healthcare, education, technology, infrastructure and social service. Mr. Yadav is on that list for his work on agentic AI for e-commerce.
ABP Live describes him as leading “the technology vision behind a new generation of autonomous commerce experiences.” For the team at Exei, that line sums up what they have been building, and why.
What the Feature Says
The feature calls him “an AI-native engineering leader” who “specialises in building production-grade agentic AI systems”. It lists resilient platform architecture, event-driven ecosystems, real-time data systems, cloud transformation and DevOps discipline as his areas of depth. At Exei, it notes, he “directs the engineering of AI agents that shape customer experience.”
Those are dry, technical phrases. In practice they decide whether an AI agent helps a brand or embarrasses it.
Why Production-Grade Matters
Getting an AI agent to work in a demo is not hard. Getting it to confirm a cash-on-delivery order before the courier arrives, answer a sizing question at one in the morning, or reach a customer who went quiet two months ago, on a live catalogue and every single time, is another matter.
Indian e-commerce makes the gap wider. Across the brands Exei works with, around 70% of carts are abandoned. Between 60% and 65% of orders are cash on delivery, and 25 to 30% of those come back as returns to origin, with the brand paying for shipping both ways. An agent that is wrong about stock, slow to confirm an order or blind to what a customer said yesterday turns straight into lost margin.
So Exei’s agents run on event-driven, real-time architecture rather than scripted chat flows. When a price changes or a size sells out, the agents know at once. When an order is placed, the confirmation goes out while the parcel is still on the shelf. That is where Mr. Yadav has focused the platform’s engineering.
How Exei Builds Agentic AI for E-commerce
Exei runs three specialised agents, each with its own job. The Shopping Assistant handles product discovery. A shopper can describe what they want in plain words, with a budget or an occasion, and the assistant answers only from the brand’s live catalogue. It also handles the last product questions about fit, material or returns that often decide whether a sale happens at all.
The Customer Service Agent takes the questions that arrive after checkout: order tracking, returns and exchanges, failed deliveries and changes before dispatch. For cash-on-delivery orders, it asks the customer to confirm on WhatsApp and follows up with a voice call if nobody replies. Anything that needs a person, because it calls for empathy or a judgement call, is raised as a ticket and handed to the brand’s team with the full conversation attached.
The Growth Agent goes after the repeat purchase. It groups customers by what they bought and how recently, then reaches them with reorder reminders, win-back offers and loyalty nudges. Its campaigns are two-way. Messages go out from the brand’s own WhatsApp number, and when a customer replies with a question, the same number answers it in the same thread. All three share one record of each customer and work across the website, WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger and voice.
Voice deserves a mention of its own. For many shoppers outside the big cities, a phone call in a familiar language still feels more natural than typing. Exei’s voice agent speaks prominent Indian languages, including English and Hindi, and its most important call is often the one that confirms a COD order the customer forgot to answer on WhatsApp. A confirmed order can ship. An unconfirmed one is a likely return.
There is also a distinction Mr. Yadav is careful about. Agentic AI is part of how Exei’s software gets built while AI agents are what Exei’s customers use. Inside the engineering team the rule is “AI generates, humans govern”. AI tools speed up the building, and engineers check the work and make the calls that need judgement.
What Brands See
The results show up where it counts, in a brand’s daily operations. Mr Makhana, which has run Exei on its Shopify store and WhatsApp, wrote in its review that “common queries that used to need a manual reply now get handled automatically, which has freed up time for the things that actually need a person.” The brand added that “order updates now go out to customers over WhatsApp in real time, so we get fewer ‘where is my order’ messages than before”, and that “setup was simple and it fits into our existing Shopify workflow without any disruption.”
That last point matters more than it sounds. Order events, catalogue sync and the WhatsApp integration all run in the background, and the brand never has to look at them.
Beyond Exei
The feature also mentions his work with The AI Native Project, “an open community of technology and engineering leaders advancing AI-native development, responsible AI adoption, and new approaches to engineering and governance.”
In his own description, leadership is measured by trust, ownership and perspective, and shaped by empathy, honest feedback and continuous learning. It is a people-first view of a very technical job, and it explains a lot about how Exei’s engineering team works. he added
Autonomy without accountability is a liability. The brands that scale AI successfully will be the ones that can trust it with their customers and their margins. At Exei, every agent is engineered for that trust from the first line of code.
About Exei
Exei equips high-growth e-commerce brands with pre-built AI agents for customer service, product discovery, and retention campaigns. Customer experience is the new growth engine. We engineer the AI agents that run it. Instead of a basic, generic chatbot, Exei uses three specialized AI agents – Shopping Assistant, Customer Service, and Growth Agent – to automate product discovery, resolve customer enquiries, and proactively engage across WhatsApp, Website Chat, Instagram, Facebook, Shopify, and AI Voice, connected to a single customer view to handle the entire shopping journey.
