Macroeconomic conditions are putting pressure on companies to improve efficiency and their employees and managers to do more with less. In the midst of all the challenges and tribulations, employees believe that most part of the work week is productive, with the majority of respondents to a recent (2018) Intuit survey saying they get more done with fewer meetings, for one – and sleep with others.
That’s not good news for employers. But Pete Christotoulou, co-founder of Xembly, believes that AI will affect change here – especially AI in the fields of natural language processing and machine learning.
“AI can ultimately enable a new software and communication model that will improve the workplace,” Christotoulou told TechCrunch in an email interview. “We are at the beginning of ‘mega shifts’ that will unlock automation. So far, AI innovations have been directed at consumer-oriented or back-office corporate functions. But ultimately we can provide personalized, conversational support wherever employees are—in Slack, email, shadowing in meetings—on command to do whatever they need.
This type of ambient workplace intelligence is what Crystal hopes to realize with Xembly, which taps AI for analysis. Discover the purpose behind conversations in meetings, Slack, and email and help employees accomplish tasks. Christotoulou launched the startup with Peter Francis and Jason Flax, founder of Microsoft’s Kinect and HoloLens team, who helped drive their natural language and speech recognition efforts. Francis previously led global development for Qualtrics.
Xembly today raised a $15 million Series A round led by Norwest Venture Partners with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Ascend, Seven Peaks Ventures and Flex Capital, bringing the startup’s total funding to $20 million.
According to Christotoulou, “Betrayal… automates tasks that frustrate employees, and frees them to focus on high-value work.
Xembly uses a variety of algorithms to solve scheduling, automated note-taking and more, all of which can be initiated through a conversational AI agent. Platform Notebook’s machine learning pipeline can extract action items and summarize key moments of meetings, says Christotoulou, thanks to a model trained on a dataset of corporate meetings. After a meeting, Xembly sends a summary with the above action items that can be shared with attendees and optionally schedule a focus time to work on the items, or leads in subsequent meetings. The list goes on.
Image Credits: Xembly
So that employees don’t have to worry that Xembly isn’t giving them enough privacy, as workplace surveillance software typically does, Christothoulou says Xembly can be set to delete items immediately after processing them.
AI-driven meeting assistants have been popular fields in the era of remote meetings, work-from-home setups, and general digital transformation. For example, Avoma developed software that automates meeting processes to make discussions more practical (or so the company claims). Workfit eavesdrops on business meetings and highlights important action items, leveraging customer relationship management platforms for automated updates. Julie Desk handles scheduling of meetings, appointments, and more.
The list goes on. But perhaps the biggest threat to Xembly is voice transcription app Otter, which in March rolled out an automatic to-do list feature to create meeting summaries and a panel that captures action items, decisions and key meeting moments. That sounds a lot like Xembly’s core feature set, but Cristotulu unifies the issue in a way that sets Xembly apart from the many different capabilities its competitors offer.
“Our competitors are focused on things like scheduling, meeting notes, task management, to-do lists and meeting feedback,” Christoholu said. “Xembly is focused on bringing those different work streams together, into one conversational platform that actively works to set you up for success.”
Along with early users, including teams at Convoy, Unerth Technologies and Main Street, Xembly is currently working hard to improve the platform’s AI capabilities and find new customers, Cristolou said. Building on AI R&D to date, improvements to Xembly have begun since the service’s launch in June, including tips to streamline staff schedules and reminders to complete tasks or schedule meetings.
“Xembly was born during the pandemic, it is just changing the way we work. Xembly has helped employees adapt to the new challenges of remote work, and will continue to help make teams more productive, Christoholu said. “We are positioned to see strong and responsible growth as we continue to scale our product and user base.”
If the 25-employee Xembly — which currently doesn’t charge a fee — can convince companies that their employees will be more productive with AI-powered help, it could make good on those last promises.
