Interview

AITech Interview with Adit Jain, Co-Founder & CEO at Leena AI

Learn more about Leena AI’s smart AI Assistant for Modern Enterprises through Adit Jain’s insights. 

Kindly brief us about yourself and your role as the Co-Founder & CEO at Leena AI.

Ever since I was a child, I found immense pleasure in creating new things with my own hands, from Legos with friends to electrical circuits for school projects. I loved how things would come to life and add value to everyone around me. I’ve always had a creative mindset, and that played heavily into my wanting to be an entrepreneur. Throughout my IIT-Delhi days, I had been building and creating, whether in tech fests, competitions, or computer algorithm assignments and trying to figure out ways to make people’s lives easier and better. 

Over time, I realized that I wanted to utilize my creative mindset to find solutions and establish the next best thing that the world needed. That is one specific thing that has kept me going and even led me to build Leena AI. 

I have seen Leena AI scale through from a three-person team working from each other’s apartments to more than 300 people globally today. It has been an extremely enriching journey, replete with learning and growth. The one thing that has stayed constant for all of us at Leena AI is our hunger for growth – both individually and as a team. Our passion continues to be wanting to add value to people’s lives and helping our own team grow personally, as well as professionally. 

Can you provide an overview of Leena AI and its core offerings in the field of artificial intelligence?

Leena AI is an AI work assistant designed for modern enterprises. We recently launched our own large language model, WorkLM, which empowers enterprises worldwide to redefine how employees engage with work, delivering a transformative impact on productivity and efficiency.

WorkLM, built on our breakthrough language model architecture, possesses an unparalleled predictive text generation capability, producing human-like responses in context. This further empowers employees with a versatile toolset to accomplish tasks with exceptional precision and speed, unlocking unprecedented levels of productivity and efficiency.

We also seamlessly integrate with 1,000+ applications, including SAP, Salesforce, ServiceNow, ADP, Oracle, Workday, and Microsoft Office 365. Our solutions have been successfully deployed across 90+ countries, serving over 400+ customers, including leading enterprises such as Nestlé, Puma, Coca-Cola, Sony, and Etihad Airways, to name a few.

What specific applications of AI does Leena AI focus on, and how do they benefit businesses and organizations?

Our solutions are powered by Generative AI, and our proprietary large language model, WorkLM, has been built especially for enterprise employee experience. It harnesses our breakthrough language model architecture to provide an unparalleled predictive text generation capability, resulting in human-like responses. 

The specific applications include:

  • Intelligent Virtual Assistant: WorkLM can underpin a smart virtual assistant capable of understanding and executing complex tasks, managing multi-turn conversations, and providing real-time information.
  • Handling Complex Commands Across Multiple Systems: WorkLM can interpret and execute complex commands across multiple systems and knowledge sources, intelligently building workflows on the fly to streamline operations.
  • Identifying Knowledge Gaps and Creating Knowledge: WorkLM can identify knowledge gaps within an organization and generate knowledge from existing non-standard sources such as ticket resolutions and emails.
  • Intelligent Robotic Process Automation (RPA): WorkLM, integrated with RPA, can enhance efficiency and effectiveness by understanding and automating routine tasks.
  • Business Intelligence from Enterprise Data: WorkLM can analyze extensive enterprise data to provide actionable business intelligence, facilitating data-driven decisions.
  • Helpdesk Intelligence: WorkLM can enhance the capabilities of a helpdesk by providing accurate responses and solutions to a wide array of queries and issues, thereby reducing resolution times and improving customer satisfaction.
  • Text Analysis: WorkLM can mine insights from large volumes of text data, performing tasks such as identifying trends, sentiment analysis, or extracting specific information.
  • Email Auto-completion: WorkLM can provide contextually relevant suggestions for email drafting, improving communication efficiency.
  • Document Generation: WorkLM can generate reports, meeting minutes, and other types of documents based on specific requirements, translating complex instructions into high-quality, human-like text.
  • Human-like Autonomous Agents: WorkLM can drive autonomous agents that handle a variety of low-value tasks within an enterprise, freeing human resources for more strategic endeavors.

How does Leena AI ensure data privacy and security in its AI-powered products and services?

Since our solutions are powered by our own large language model, WorkLM, it allows us to protect our clients’ data as we are not required to share it with any third party. We are also SOC2-certified and GDPR-compliant. 

Can you share any examples or case studies where Leena AI has successfully implemented its AI solutions to solve real-world business challenges?

While there are many examples, I would like to point out one with UHA Health Insurance. One of the primary challenges they faced was the lack of a robust platform to drive real-time engagement and collect employee feedback. It was also difficult for them to get employees’ pulse, especially when remote working became the norm during the pandemic.

At the time, employee engagement became more daunting with extended lockdowns, forcing employees to work remotely. UHA saw remote work as the ideal time to take an agile engagement approach to get a holistic view of employee engagement. While there were many online surveys to choose from, Leena AI’s innovative and interactive survey caught UHA’s attention. Our customizable avatar, easy integration prowess for easy deployment, bank of questions to choose from, a team of subject matter experts to consult with, and analytics to understand their employee pulse better made for a great solution for UHA.

After partnering with Leena AI, UHA noticed that more than 75% of UHA’s associates participated in the pulse survey, along with thousands of qualitative comments and feedback, making it a successful engagement partnership.

Additionally, our smart sentiment analysis technology analyzed thousands of associates’ comments to help identify what’s actually working well and what needs improvement. UHA was able to identify the problem areas and add them to its business plan for the coming year. 

In your opinion, what are the key challenges and opportunities in the AI industry today, and how is Leena AI positioned to address them?

The biggest opportunities we see today are, how can we use virtual assistants in enterprises to elevate employees from doing repetitive, mundane work, and free their time so they can add strategic value to the business. 

For example, our client Coca-Cola Beverages Vietnam, with a workforce of over 4,000 employees meant that on any given day, the HR executives would receive numerous employee queries within the organization ranging from leave status, medical insurance, payroll, etc. This took valuable time for the HR team to sign off multiple employee approvals. Moreover, as per company policy, approval from the CEO or the Director was necessary to clear high-value travel requests. Since most of these requests were urgent in nature, the CEO and the Director had to allocate a significant amount of time for approvals. Needless to say, the task was repetitive and monotonous.

Essentially, they needed a platform that could help them automate the resolution of queries and employee processes at the same time. Additionally, the platform had to act as the linchpin for the 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.

We created a single communication interface for employees by integrating the existing systems of SAP, Salesforce, the local attendance system, and other internal software. We also integrated with Workplace by Facebook, which was already in use by the company, to prevent the set-up and training of a new application. We witnessed over a 40% reduction in time for approving employee requests as well as a 50% reduction in the employees’ time to access relevant company information.

What are the key factors that organizations should consider when implementing AI solutions, and how does Leena AI support its clients throughout the implementation process?

A lot of the time CXOs want to implement AI because it seems like the next cool thing to do. But that actually is not a good enough reason. Instead, Organizations should identify specific problems and accordingly seek an AI-powered solution. Once they reach that stage, they should ideally do a trial basis or a pilot with their vendor of choice, post which they can scale it across the organization.

At Leena AI we follow a similar process. We customize our solutions based on our client’s needs. So we begin by auditing their existing processes and analyzing their tickets and building solutions accordingly. We typically start with one solution and then scale it along the way. After approximately nine months we do another deep dive and conduct another audit to identify whether any changes need to be made.

How does Leena AI ensure continuous improvement and adaptation of its AI models to stay up-to-date with evolving technology and business needs?

Most of our AI development and improvement is based on the specific requirements of our customers. Therefore, we take these factors into consideration, which further forms our product roadmap. 

Are there any ethical considerations that Leena AI takes into account when developing and deploying AI solutions?

There are three crucial factors we consider: The first is ensuring that our Generative-AI powered solutions deliver correct responses, i.e. those that are ethical and moral. In order to ensure this, we run two models simultaneously so we can fact-check every response to every prompt. There is WorkLM, which has a learning capacity of seven billion parameters, and a smaller model of 2.5 billion parameters. We test every response across both parameters and once they deliver the same response, we have the guarantee that they are both correct and in alignment. 

The second factor we take into consideration is drawing a line on the kind of decisions AI should and should not be able to make. 

Finally, the third factor is protecting employees and their jobs. Some of our solutions can potentially take over people’s jobs, and so, before deploying such products, we have a discussion with our clients on the learning and development of their respective employees. This can be through upskilling, reskilling, inter-departmental functions, and so on. We are working on creating a practice around this, to advise all our customers and the industry at large to manage the socio-economic impact. 

What advice would you give the budding entrepreneur aspiring to venture into the AI space?

It is an ever-changing space! Their focus should be on fundamentals such as understanding algorithmic design or learning languages such as Python, which is important in this industry. Essentially one can learn best practices through hands-on experience, so I would advise them to try new things as much as possible since most of the frameworks are open-source today. 

That said, building something is only one aspect, but production is another ball game altogether. For example, having a seven billion parameter model is easy, but running it successfully in production is a challenge. Therefore, I would recommend that organizations focus on building constantly while simultaneously figuring out the production aspect i.e. taking their respective products to the market.

Adit Jain

Co-founder, and CEO at Leena AI

Adit, an IIT-Delhi grad, and Y-Combinator alumni, brings a deep understanding of HR needs for an exceptional employee experience. With experience at EY and IIM Lucknow, Adit embarked on his entrepreneurial journey with Chatteron in 2015. Transitioning to Leena AI, inspired by a study on Chatteron’s profitability, he never looked back.

Adit draws inspiration from books like “Zero to One” by Peter Thiel, “Founders at Work” by Jessica Livingston, and “Good to Great” by James C. Collins. His advice to aspiring entrepreneurs? “Just do it.” Taking action and persevering increases your chances of success, despite failures and necessary pivots along the way.

Adit’s accomplishments include being featured in the Forbes 30 Under 30 US and Canada list for Enterprise Technology.

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