Automation and artificial intelligence have made their way into every field, including HR. However, Leena AI the startup devoted to developing HR chatbots has introduced AI into HR in a novel role. Its chatbots are capable of answering employees’ questions pertaining to insurance, status of leaves, and so on.
The startup that came into existence last year, just completed a first round of seed funding, with many investors putting in their capital in the venture, including Snapdeal co-founders Kunal Bahl, Rohit Bansal and Elad Gil. The Company already has 16 subscribers, including Marico, RPG, Coca-Cola Vietnam and Pearson, and hopes the figure will see a four-fold rise by 2019.
Originally, the Gurugram-based Company was launched as ChatterOn in 2015 by the founders— Adit Jain, Mayank Goyal and Anand Prajapati — who had just finished college then. It helped people create their own chatbots, and that is when they realised that chatbots were a necessity in HR. This prompted them to launch Leena AI.
The field of HR is all about resolving issues and answering fundamental questions, such as adding new members to health insurance cover and leave balance. Even though all the information is available in the HR policy, people are habituated to calling the HR or writing to them.
Adit Jain, co-founder of Leena AI feels that a chatbot can respond to queries quickly and save the employees a lot of precious time. Moreover, employees can access the chatbot through Facebook’s Workplace, Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Cisco Spark, Slack, Skype for Business, and other instant messaging platforms. The Leena AI chatbot is also accessible via the Web and mobile.
All the chatbot requires is a set of policy documents. Everything else is taken care of by machine learning, which equips the chatbot with information capable of being transformed into a structured set of FAQs. This information is extracted from the policy documents and data from the systems that function at the back end, such as SAP and Oracle.
While this particular chatbot is focussed only on HR, the possibility of such chatbots being applied to other departments and functions in the corporate sector, such as IT, finance, and procurement, in the future cannot be denied.
