What the Leena AI Does?
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, and MS Office 365. It is trusted by 350+ companies worldwide including Nestlé, Puma, AirAsia, Coca-Cola, Lafarge Holcim, and Abbott with millions of employees worldwide relying on the platform.
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, employee life cycle, 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 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 - from onboarding to engagement to offboarding.
While there are other companies offering similar products in the industry, Leena AI stands out as the only player when it comes to HR-Tech.
Company Birth Story
The main idea behind starting the company was to give a personal virtual assistant - or a Siri - 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 back in 2015-16, Chatteron, a free platform for building chatbots, 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 couple of months, they tried to understand the issue in further depth and discovered that in large companies, employees had very little access to information about company policies, salaries, and benefits. Despite the availability of the information, it was scattered. With Leena AI, they created a platform that was entirely HR-centric. Today, anyone can approach Leena, and she knows what they want. Not just that, Leena AI is completely configurable according to a company’s requirements, is available in 100+ languages, and also plays well with 100+ plus platforms, including SAP SuccessFactors, ADP, Oracle, Workday, Microsoft Office 365, among others.
The Solution
Leena AI's mission has remained constant since its inception. Today, 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 was initially focused on providing HR-related solutions, it is now expanding its horizons to IT, Administration, Finance, Sales, and much more.
Creating a Siri 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 an all-in-one platform for employees so that they never have to raise a ticket for IT, Finance, Admin, etc. Soon, Leena AI aims to become the only personal virtual assistant any employee would need in an organization.
A Customer Story
One of Leena AI’s most valued clients', Coca-Cola Vietnam required a platform that could help them automate, as well as find a resolution to queries and employee processes simultaneously. Additionally, they needed the platform 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 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 was included in the HR bot. In close collaboration with Leena AI’s Customer Success and Product Development teams, 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 Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and conversational AI to understand issues and deliver resolutions within seconds.
Today, some of the key capabilities of AskMi that are winning employees are:
40% reduction in time for approving employee request
50% reduction in the employees’ time to access relevant company information
Downloading payslips and getting information on tax deductions, even raising reimbursements
Managing leaves, time, and attendance
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 tremendously 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 employees more compliant. We are having a great experience with the Leena AI product, and the customer service.”
Coca-Cola Beverages Vietnam is one of the best-known international brands in Vietnam, and it has been recognized as the best company to Work for in Asia 2020 by HR Asia. In addition, they have also been recognized as the 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 its 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.
The Team Culture
There are 13 members in the core team - those from the major departments in the company, and the co-founders.
There is Adit Jain, CEO, and co-founder, Mayank Goyal, Head of AI and co-founder, Anand Prajapati, CTO and co-founder, Chirayu Akotiya, the Global Head of Marketing, Sarthak Saini, Head - Revenue ROW, Abhishek Bansal, VP - Leena Engage and ERM, Shubham Agarwal, VP - Engineering, Vikash Kumar, Regional VP - Customer Success, Ajay Agarwal, Delivery Head - US, Pravin Gandhi, Delivery Head - ROW (other than the US), Darryl Stork, Director - US Sales, Saurabh Kansal, VP - Sales for APAC and EMEA, and Sanya Nagpal, Head of Human Resources.
In a general sense, the five core values of Leena AI are - innovation, customer-first mindset, bold bets, ownership, and building a rockstar team. Apart from these, 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 - be it the size of the deal or the number of stakeholders involved with it.
We also strongly believe in providing the entire team with a detailed description of the thought process that the senior leadership goes through when making changes - however minute, 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 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 out more: https://leena.ai/
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