Have you ever faced a situation where you started thinking that it's useless to share feedback with senior managers or a feeling of 'not working anymore' in the office - it happens with most employees; after all, we are humans. The situation gets out of control when the company lacks empathy and proper mechanisms in place to hear them out, ultimately resulting in higher attrition. 

Sensing the need for a solution, the duo - Tanmaya Jain and Varun Puri came up with their startup named inFeedo. Rather than being a full-spectrum HR solution, the startup is solving a very niche problem - to stop organisations from neglecting their employees, thereby minimising the attrition rate. 

"We started operations in 2013 when Varun and I were still in college. Early on, I realised that people were often taught to follow a set template or path and shut down if they were thinking out of the box. Hierarchy or bias was often the justification, and it was not too different in a corporate structure. Organisations often neglect their employees and their experience at work. We decided to tackle this problem head-on, which is how we started up," said Tanmaya Jain, Founder & CEO, inFeedo. 

inFeedo's march-on after the initial glitch 

Soon after their graduation in 2016, both Tanmaya and Varun had a moment of shock. Building the right team or getting any funding was distant; they had not yet figured out the right product-market fit. The operations were about to shut down in August 2016. However, a Monday morning chat about how employees don't want to go to the office turned things around.  

Tanmaya thought of an individual whose only job was to talk to employees, find out how each employee actually feels and "present a report to the CEO" to figure out which employee is happy, who is disengaged and therefore "likely to leave." Expecting this from an HR Business Partner will be too much, and that's how the idea came up - organisations needed to adopt conversational AI to do this at scale. 

Meet Amber, the conversational AI and employees experience platform reporting directly to the CEO. 

The Product aka Chief Listening Officer 

Sitting at the intersection of contextual and conversational AI, Amber is a SaaS platform to uncover hidden gaps in an organisation's remote culture and teams. With its availability in 100 plus languages, Amber uses the GPT3 language model coupled with inFeedo's proprietary algorithm LexScore, built in-house. "A part of our chat flow and conversations with employees is adaptive. We have kept another part knowingly static to ensure HRBPs don't have to deal with hygiene issues during data analysis," said Tanmaya. 

Amber remembers feedback and contextualises the conversation accordingly. This helps build trust with the employees, and for leadership, this helps retain data continuity, despite attrition in the HR teams. Today, Amber is being used by more than 225 enterprise customers globally across various sectors, including financial services, healthcare, and ITeS, to name a few. Some of their customers in India include Tata, Samsung, Airtel, Lenovo, and Xiaomi. As per the company, using Amber, customers have been able to retain 85% of their top talent, get 33X quantifiable ROI and save 2.5 days on average in a week for an HRBP. 

Talking about the privacy concerns, Tanmaya said, "Amber has a 'trust statement' which is displayed at the beginning of every conversation, and it clearly defines how the data collected will be used, and the names of CXOs who have access to the data. For example, direct line managers cannot access feedback, further amplifying trust with the employees." 

Roadblocks 

One of the biggest challenges is the mindset. Few HR leaders remain sceptical about believing that employees will engage and talk to AI chatbots, whereas the reality turned out to be the opposite. "Our customers have seen a great adoption of Amber, and instances where employees have said that they feel 'Amber is human' and that someone is listening to them," said Tanmaya. 

Another challenge pertains to maintaining data hygiene in customer HRMS while deploying AI and ML in HR. However, it is true for any industry. For an AI solution to work effectively, the accuracy and quality of the input are crucial. One of InFeedo's customers said, "Technology can act as a mirror and show us the gaps, but the HR team needs to take decisive steps to plug those gaps." 

Future plans 

From a product perspective, it wants to continue investing heavily in the depth of its existing product. With more than six years of experience in people science research and a unique mix of people science and conversational AI teams, Tanmaya believes they have been able to stay a step ahead of the competition and will continue to innovate and expand on their product leadership. From a market expansion point of view, the plan is to double down on the mid-market and enterprise segment with organisations that have employees in the range of 500 to 120,000 and expand the focus to the US.  

"We have successfully captured the market opportunity in South East Asia, and we have already started seeing success in the US. At our last fundraiser, we wanted to grow 6x in 2.5 years, and we are on track to achieve this," concluded Tanmaya.