The challenge
Amul's 3.6 million farmers have limited access to veterinary guidance, modern farming practices, and government subsidies. Amul had the data to help: five decades of procurement records and treatment histories for 30 million cattle.
What they needed was a way to get that knowledge to farmers in their language, on devices they already own. Most don't use smartphones. The only channel that works across every village and every literacy level is voice.
Meet Sarlaben
Sarlaben is Amul's AI-powered voice assistant for dairy farmers. Farmers call a number, speak in Gujarati, and get advice on cattle health, vaccination schedules, feeding practices, breeding management, and government subsidies, drawn from Amul's own livestock and procurement systems and tailored to their individual herd.
A farmer with a feature phone in a remote village gets the same guidance as someone using the Amul Farmer app on a smartphone. No download. No data plan. No digital literacy barrier. Just a call.
Why voice, why Plivo
Voice is the hardest channel to get right. It's also the only channel that reaches every farmer in India. Plivo powers the voice layer behind Sarlaben, handling the calls that connect farmers to AI-driven advice.
Reliability that rural India demands
When a farmer calls about a sick animal, the call has to connect. There's no retry in a village with limited connectivity. Plivo's carrier-grade network provides consistent call quality regardless of where the call originates.
Built to scale with adoption
As Sarlaben grows across 3.6 million farmers, the platform scales with it. Amul and their technology partners focus on the AI and the advisory content. The voice layer handles itself.
Inbound and outbound, same platform
Sarlaben started as inbound: farmers call in for advice. Now Amul is expanding to outbound, proactively reaching farmers to introduce Sarlaben and educate them on how it can help. Both directions run on Plivo.
The vision
Sarlaben was unveiled by Gujarat Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel and referenced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the AI Impact Summit 2026. The ambition: AI-powered advisory to every dairy farmer in the cooperative, across every village, in a language they speak. Timely cattle health advice, better feeding guidance, subsidies that previously went unclaimed. All through the simplest interface possible: a phone call in their own language.
What's next
Sarlaben launched in Gujarati. It's now expanding to 20 Indian languages across 20,000 villages in 20 states, built on the government's Bhashini multilingual framework. Inbound for advice. Outbound for awareness. Same platform, same reliability.
The calls are connecting. Adoption is growing. And the information gap that has existed for decades is starting to close.
Voice AI that reaches everyone. Not just smartphone users.