Everything from employee onboarding to payroll can now be done with the click of a mouse and organizations large and small have warmed to the use of technology in HR functions. However, behind the proliferation, technology also has limitations. So what can HR technology do to change the future of HR and where does it struggle?
According to Adit Jain, co-founder and CEO of HR technology company Leena A, everything that is repetitive is about implementing technology. “In today’s workforce, depending on how automated it is, 40-60% of the work can be done through technology. The rest of the work – for example helping an employee in his work – are aspects where technology has a limited role. Creating an employee, their aspirations, goals, aspirations and then a personalized career path is something that technology struggles to do. This is where the real value of HR teams comes in as one of their key roles. Similarly, conflict management, motivation are areas where HRs have to work on their own,” says Jain.
Helping HR teams break the doldrums of repetitive work has many benefits, says Jain. When Leena joined forces with Anand Prajapati and Mayank Goyal to start AI in 2015, the idea was to provide a personal virtual assistant like Siri to all workers around the world to make their lives easier.
Jane Lena AI covers all employee touch points – from employee onboarding to employee exit. With Lina AI, companies can eliminate the need for employee-oriented teams to work on tasks like answering policy-related questions, generating employee documents on demand, and managing employee tickets so they can focus on high-value tasks. In addition, Leena AI enables organizations to proactively listen to their employees and take real-time action to increase employee engagement.
Genesis
Jain met Prajapati and Goyal at IIT Delhi in 2011 and were in the same group. Today, at Lina AI, Prajapati holds the portfolio of chief technology officer, while Goyal is the head of AI.
“Besides being in the same room, we were in the same dorm and soon became good friends. We often worked together on projects ranging from automatic content summarization to face recognition. Much later, in 2015, as we were about to end the academic term, initiatives were coming. We’ve been reading a fair amount of global startup stories, and that inspired us to jump. Although we had work on our hands, our focus was on building something of our own. That same year, we started our journey with a chatbot building platform called Chatron,” says 28-year-old Jain.
While working at Chatterton, the founders realized that companies with over 1,000 employees were using the platform to create internal HR and IT chatbots. In the next two months, they found that employees in large companies are less likely to have access to information about company policies, wages and benefits. Although the information is available, it is scattered.
After starting our research, we found that employees spend more than 60% of their time searching for information about their jobs. We noticed a gap in the industry, and that became the idea behind Lina AI,” says Jain.
Jain says that with Lina AI, they have created a platform that is completely HR-oriented. “Today, anyone can talk to Lena, and she knows what they want. Not only this, Lina AI is fully configurable as per the company’s specifications and is available in more than 100 languages,” said Jain.
Rapid growth
According to Jain, the HR technology space has been growing in the past couple of years, and is being called a sunrise sector. The global workforce technology market is valued at USD 22.89 billion in 2020 and is expected to grow from USD 24.04 billion in 2021 to USD 35.68 billion in 2028 at a CAGR of 5.8%. According to estimates, India will account for $3.6 billion of that market by 2021.
“Additionally, since the outbreak, employers have redoubled their focus on their employees. Core policies and strategies are now more employee-centric. The world has become remote for the first time in a century, and with it, employers are paying more attention to employee satisfaction, mental and physical well-being and employee engagement. Additionally, as many job opportunities become global and access to remote skills is becoming commonplace, employers are beginning to think about their key employees and how to retain them,” says Jain.
HR tech is a crowded space and Lina AI competes with products from established multinational companies such as Darwinbox, Bash, Skillet, Edge Networks, PeopleStrong and Oracle and SAP.
Jane’s suite of products address end-to-end service delivery and employee engagement issues for HR leaders, regardless of the complexity of the issues. We are an integration-first platform with a cloud-first modern architecture where enterprises can plug and play with minimal implementation effort and time to value. Lina AI is system and channel-agnostic – meaning it connects to any HIS/MS system and communication platforms such as mobile apps, desktop, Slack, Teams, Workplace and more. We play well with 100+ platforms including SAP SuccessFactors, ADP, Oracle, Workday and Microsoft Office 365,” says Jain.
Godrej Industries evaluated several vendors when they wanted to empower their employees with a digital assistant that solves IT queries and provides IT support 24/7. In the end, they found this integration to be better with Lina AI. The company helped to streamline the work.
“Initially, the flow of IT support calls was huge,” says Satyavrat Mishra, AVP – Corporate IT at Godrej Industries. “There was one contact number and employees would call for all their queries. After introducing modules like system cleanup and printer installation, such queries have reduced. Now, we are planning to integrate more automation scripts and reduce the dependency on engineers for basic IT support. This will improve turnaround time for employees. , improves the efficiency of the IT team and helps us realize the full potential of the Lina AI platform.
The startup was initially funded by the founders. They took a small loan from friends and family. The Y-Combinator-backed firm has secured Series A funding from Greycroft in 2020. In the year In 2021, it raised $30 million in Series B funding, backed by Graycroft and a new investor, Seamer Venture Partners. The round also included an investment from Facebook founder Eduardo Saverin’s B Capital Group.
The CEO of Lina AI admits that at first they did not have a clear path. “In the beginning, we knew very little about what to solve and who to solve for, and we had to stay afloat and get enough customers to believe in us to prove ourselves. There were a lot of ups and downs that kept us alive in the first phase. But now, even at the pre-PMF level, one has to race It can raise money, but that wasn’t the case when we started a few years ago,” says Jain.
Despite the odds, Jain says it’s been an amazing journey since starting out as a three-man team working alongside each other in an apartment. “Today, we work with more than 350 enterprise customers worldwide, including leading organizations such as Nestlé, Puma, AirAsia, Coca-Cola, Lafarge and Holcim and Abbott, where more than six million employees interact with Lina AI every day. To date, we have managed more than 100 million employee conversations.” Lina AI follows an annual subscription model, with monthly user license fees based on user usage. The company did not disclose revenue numbers.
Jain plans to expand the company’s employee experience suite to products such as IT, sales and finance.
