Hyperleap AI
www.parkworld-online.com
Closing the after-hours gap: what India’s oldest zoo taught us about AI visitor assistants
By Gopi Krishna Lakkepuram, Founder & CEO, Hyperleap AI I
t is 9pm on a Friday and a family is planning tomorrow's day out. They land on your attraction’s website with three questions: What time do you open? How much are tickets for two adults and two children? Is the park push-chair-friendly? They don’t want to call. And even if they did,
nobody is on the phones, the contact form promises a reply "within one working day", and the answers are scattered across four pages on the website. Some of those families persist in finding out. Many simply pick the attraction that answered. This is the after-hours gap, and most attractions
have one. Visits are planned in the evening, maybe on the phone, often the night before, which is precisely when the box office and the switchboard are closed. Timings, tickets, directions, parking, accessibility, what's on today: the same practical queries, asked thousands of times, in different words and increasingly in different languages. These questions were never hard to answer. They just arrive at all hours; in volumes no information desk can staff for. Website chatbots have existed for years, and most earned their poor reputation honestly: rigid menus, keyword matching, "Sorry, I didn't understand that." A modern AI assistant is different in kind. It is *grounded* in the venue's own content (pages, price lists, policies, guides) and answers in natural language from that material rather than guessing or keyword matching and failing. When a question falls outside what it knows, it says so and prompt escalates, while also capturing the visitor's details.
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A 130-year-old test case One of the more instructive deployments I have been part of is at Sri Chamarajendra Zoological Gardens, better known as Mysuru Zoo. It is India's oldest zoo, established in 1892, home to 168 species and millions of visitors a year. Its audience spans local families, domestic tourists, international travellers and school groups, in several languages, with very different questions. Building the assistant, we learned that attraction questions are anchored in time and place in a way generic chatbots quietly fail. "Is it open now?" has no answer unless the assistant knows what time it is right now, in the zoo's time zone, against today's schedule. "Are you open tomorrow?" means working out which day tomorrow actually is, and whether it happens to be the weekly closing day or a public holiday with special hours. So, we built that awareness in: the assistant reasons about the current date, time and calendar before it answers, rather than reciting an opening-hours paragraph. It also answers with more than text. Ask how
to get around and it shares the park map. Ask what to prioritise, and "we have three hours and the children want to see the gorilla" becomes a workable route through a 157-acre site, something no FAQ page ever did before. And the assistant's job does not end at the gate.
Many visitors continue the same conversation inside the park, with the questions that only occur mid-visit: when the next safari departs, what is
worth seeing nearby, the story behind the animals in the zoo. That last one matters a lot, because it quietly turns visitors into partners: the same conversation can point them to supporting the zoo through donations and adopting animals for care.
What to look for For operators evaluating this, four questions matter more than any demo. Is the assistant grounded in your own content, so it cannot invent a price or an opening time? Does it understand time and place? Does it answer in ways other than just text? Does it cover the languages your visitors actually speak? And what happens when it does not know: does it admit it, hand it over to a human and capture the visitor's details?
None of this replaces people. It absorbs the repetitive load off-hours and during busy times, so front-of-house teams can do the work only humans can do. The family planning their trip at 9pm will get their answer from some park for sure. It may as well be you.
Gopi Krishna Lakkepuram is the founder and CEO of Hyperleap AI, which builds AI visitor and customer assistants for small and mid- sized businesses, including attractions. Before founding Hyperleap, he built systems serving billions of users at Microsoft on Offi ce 365 and
Outlook.com.
https://hyperleap.ai
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