Several months ago, Savir Dillikar was on the phone with a customer representative from Apple. His earbuds weren’t working during the call, and he was having a hard time trying to get the representative to hear him.
“I kept on trying to talk to them, but it wasn’t working,” said Dillikar, who is a resident of Milpitas. “The experience of going through that isn’t great because you know they’re never going to call you back. They don’t have time for that.”
After that interaction, Dillikar, who is 15 years old, had an idea…
What if he created a kind of AI customer service agent that could make and receive calls for various companies?
“I feel like we need a mediator that will always respond to you,” said Dillikar. “So basically, when you’re struggling with something, you can talk to the AI agent and he will escalate it to the actual company’s headquarters and he’ll call you back and keep you in the loop.”
So a week later, Dillikar teamed up with his college-aged brother and his brother’s friends. They joined forces and used Dillikar’s idea to win this past September’s AWS Enterprise Agents Hackathon.
“I’ve won a total of 10 Hackathons so far,” said Dillikar, who started entering Hackathons when he was in 7th grade…
A couple years ago, Dillikar’s father, seeing his son’s interest in STEM, encouraged Dillikar to sign up to compete in his first Hackathon. Even though Dillikar lost his first several Hackathons, he kept going. Kept refining his ideas, sharpening his focus.
That’s when he started winning competitions from the Fun Hackathon Weekend to Random Forest Hackathon to Hackabyte, and Viking Hacks.
Asked what has motivated him toward accomplishing so much, Dillikar credits the influence of his older brother…
“I remember when I was in 2nd grade, my brother was in 7th grade. And I would see him working on these robotic cars. I thought it was super cool, and I knew early on that I wanted to do the same thing,” said Dillikar. “My brother’s my role model, so I’ve always tried to pace up with him. That’s what has really fueled my ambition.”
Dillikar also remembers when he was a student at Burnett Elementary School, where they would teach STEM classes and give students the opportunity to build all different creations.
“It would be very simple, like a water filtering system,” said Dillikar. “And I really enjoyed those types of things. And then I always tried to do more and take things a step further.”
Dillikar is currently a sophomore at Milpitas High School (MHS), where he loves to study Math and Science. And now, with nearly a dozen Hackathon wins under his belt, Dillikar is busy putting his energy into some new projects…
He’s working on creating a nonprofit called Code Circle, which would give users the ability to generate any kind of online course they want by using AI. And stemming from his idea of the AI agent with both inbound and outbound calling, Dillikar developed an app called Kailasa, which he refers to as “the first ‘persuasive’ goal-setting assistant” that focuses on health, wealth, and relationships.
At first, the app only had about 50 users – all of which were Dillikar’s friends and family. But within the last couple months, as Dillikar further developed and refined the app, the number of users shot up to 10,000! People signed up from 45 different countries.
“I feel great that people are seeing my vision and enjoying my app,” said Dillikar. “I really need to thank my brother for all this because without having a role model like him, I don’t think I ever would have achieved anything close to this.”
Dillikar is currently trying to determine how to scale up the app to work at an enterprise level with other businesses.
“I love how it’s touching all these countries,” said Dillikar. “And I love seeing how something that started so small turned into something this big.”
The future of tech is in safe hands when kids like this are already creating, shipping, and inspiring others ✨