What is Leena AI?
Leena AI is an autonomous conversational AI-backed platform that helps enterprises better employee experience. The platform is powerful, flexible, and made to meet the needs of any enterprise. Leena AI plays well with 100+ platforms, including ADP, Workday, MS Office 365. It is trusted by 3M+ employees across companies like Nestle, Coca-Cola, Abbott, among others.
The Current Landscape
Over the past few years due to the pandemic, employers have doubled their focus on their employees. Core policies and strategies are now more employee-centric. The world became remote for the first time in a hundred years and with that, employers paid more attention to employee satisfaction, mental and physical wellness, and employee engagement. In addition, with more job opportunities becoming global and remote talent acquisition becoming the norm, employers started to think about their key employees and how to retain them.
HR Teams had to lay more focus on factors such as seamless onboarding, the life cycle of an employee in the company, regular feedback on new and updated policies as well as work-from-home strategies. This broadened the horizon of the usage of AI in the HR-Tech space, as they started to rely on AI to alleviate the strain. Previously, the tools used by HR professionals focused solely on ERP systems that were used for payroll and attendance management.. However, with the scope getting broader, more developed tools have been introduced in the industry in the recent past. Leena AI is one such SaaS company that is built to help HR professionals with their day-to-day functions.. Leena AI provides a holistic solution that includes processes covering the entire life cycle of an employee, such as onboarding, offboarding, employee engagement, to name a few.
While there are other companies offering similar products in the industry, Leena AI stands out as the only player offering a holistic solution. In addition, over the past two years, Leena AI has secured 2 rounds of funding totalling $40m from investors, and has grown within the industry by increasing its product offerings.
The Birth of the Company
The main idea behind starting the company was to give a personal virtual assistant - or a JARVIS - in the hands of every employee in the world in order to make their lives easier. Once the co-founders of Leena AI started their research, they discovered employees typically spent over 60% of their time searching for information about their jobs. They noticed a gap within the industry, and this became the idea behind Leena AI.
While working on their first start up, Chatterton, Leena AI’s co-founders discovered that companies with more than a thousand employees were using the platform to create internal HR and IT chatbots. Over the course of the next six months, they tried to understand the issue and found that in big companies, employees had very little access to information about company policies, salaries, benefits, and despite the information being available, it was scattered. With Leena AI, they created a platform that was entirely HR-centric. Today, anyone can approach Leena, and she’ll know what they want. Not just that, Leena AI is completely configurable according to a company’s requirements, and is available in 30+ languages.
The Solution
Leena AI's mission has remained constant. Back in 2017, Leena AI’s co-founders wanted to make a “Siri” for enterprises. Though that mission remains the same, the team now prefers to refer to themselves as a “JARVIS” for employees.
With Leena AI, companies can eliminate the need for HR staff to work on tasks such as answering policy-related questions, knowledge management, generating employee documents on demand, and managing employee tickets so they can focus on high-value activities. Additionally, though initially, Leena AI focused solely on providing HR-related solutions, it is now expanding its horizons to IT, Administration, Finance, Sales, and much more.
Creating a JARVIS for employees globally is what Leena AI aims to achieve. Tangibly, bringing Leena AI into the hands of over one billion people across the globe is one of the company’s primary goals. Secondly, in terms of enterprise value, Leena AI aims to eliminate all types of ticketing solutions. The company’s vision is to make Leena AI be a one-stop-shop for all kinds of solutions to employees so that they never have to raise a ticket for IT, Finance, Admin, etc. Soon, Leena AI will become the only personal virtual assistant any employee would need in an organization.
Customer Story
Coca-Cola Beverages Vietnam is one of the best-known international brands in Vietnam, and it has been recognized as the best companies to Work for in Asia 2020 by HR Asia, and best ‘Employer of Choice - 2019’ by CareerBuilder. It is a subsidiary of The Coca-Cola Company and was established in 2012 in Vietnam. Headquartered in Ho Chi Minh, it creates more than 4000 direct jobs via their three factories in Da Nang, Ho Chi Minh, and Hanoi. The company has grown unstoppably, achieving innumerable milestones, and conquering the hearts and minds of millions of consumers.
Coca-Cola Vietnam’s requirement was for a platform that could help them automate, as well as find resolution of queries and employee processes simultaneously. Additionally, the platform had to act as the linchpin for their current systems that were operating in isolation. Leena AI’s conversational platform fit the bill perfectly and worked as an effective single platform for accessing all the information while interacting with the employees seamlessly and efficiently.
Leena AI created a single interface of communication for employees by integrating the existing systems of SAP SF, the local attendance system, and other internal software. Leena AI also integrated with Workplace by Facebook, which was already in use by the company, to prevent the set-up and training of new applications.
The overall personality of the Leena AI platform at Coca-Cola Vietnam was designed keeping in mind the local Vietnamese culture, the company’s organizational culture, and Coca-Cola’s branding in the country. Additionally, since most employees were unaware of the company’s 150-year old history and story, a training module to help them learn this was included in the HR bot. In close collaboration with the Leena AI’s Customer Success and Product Development team, Coca Cola first rolled out FAQ automation and approval of high-value travel requests. Employees simply described their HR queries on AskMi (the in-house name given to the Leena AI platform) and it used advanced NLU and conversational AI to understand the issue and deliver a resolution within seconds.
Today, some of the key capabilities of AskMi that are winning employees are:
Downloading payslips and getting information on tax deduction
Managing leaves, time, and attendance
Raising reimbursements
Receiving quick replies for routine queries
Efficiently onboarding and training new employees
Commenting on Leena AI’s capabilities, Dat Luong, Digital Solution Manager, Coca Cola Vietnam said, “Leena AI has helped us a lot in the Digital Transformation journey. We have centralized all our HR services into Leena AI and made it a single point of contact. We have saved 40% of our time for approval and request. Also, the automation of fingerprint notification has made the employees more compliant. We are having a great experience with the Leena AI product, and the customer service.”
The Team Culture
There are eight members in the core team - those from the major departments in the company, and the co-founders.
Adit Jain, Mayank Goyal and Anand Prajapati are the three co-founders, alongside them, there is Chirayu Akotiya, the Director of Product and Marketing, Sarthak Saini, Chief Revenue Officer, Abhishek Bansal, VP - Leena Engage, Shubham Agarwal, VP Engineering, and Vikash Kumar, Regional VP, Customer Success.
In a general sense, the four core values of Leena AI are - collaboration, results, efficiency, and transparency.
One of the things that Leena AI likes to put across is absolute transparency in the organization. Each and every team member has knowledge about new customer acquisitions, alongwith with the size of the deal and the people who helped close it.
Another thing that we strongly believe in and follow is that we ensure to provide the entire team a detailed description of the thought process that the senior leadership goes through when making a change in the organization.
Lastly, since collaboration is one of our core values, we believe in discussing ideas with those who are associated with the discussions, rather than having one-on-one conversations. This way, both collaboration and communication are transparent and everyone who is a stakeholder in the discussion has equal knowledge and clearance.
A Founder Quote
Something that Adit mentions whenever asked about his and the company's growth is, "If you are looking to start, and have that burning sensation of wanting to build something, I think the best thing is to begin. I have noticed that people who just start and persevere are way more likely to succeed in entrepreneurship than people who wait for the opportune moment. You will most likely fail in your first venture and will have to pivot several times, but in the end, all of it will be worth it.”
Check them out: https://leena.ai/