Employee Satisfaction: The New Area for Artificial Intelligence
Apart from health care and data analysis, artificial intelligence is now improving employee happiness and productivity.
Happybot.ai, a New York City-based startup that pioneers in this industry stood out from the Startup Olympic competition between NYC and Nordics startups. Voted by judges and audience as the most investable pitch, Happybot.ai won tickets to Slush 2016 in December this year.
Just founded in 2016, Happybot.ai is a free human-machine interaction robot empowered by artificial intelligence and university research. Through a slack platform and emails, the bot acts as an automated Chief Happiness Officer, communicating with employees to alleviate their pressure, share their burden and to improve their productivity, like in the movie Her.
Aaron Cohn founded the Happybot.ai after spending years as People and Change Consultant at PwC, where he advised companies how to cultivate office culture and improve employee happiness. While hosting company events and fun games could help make a more relaxed office environment, he also realized employees constantly feel overwhelmed by work pressure everyday thus he saw the gap where an intimate bot could fill in as a Chief Happiness Officer, who can feel the employee’s pain in real-time and communicate with them.
“It is always frustrating and painful when someone leaves the team, in particular for startups,” he said. “Once the turnover rate became high, it would be contagious among employees. That’s probably why the productivity in the U.S. remains low.”
Happybot.ai was one of five New York City startups that competed with another five Nordic rivals. The two teams went through different challenges from Vanilla Pitching, Elevator Pitching and Product Demo to Karaoke Pitching that tested the founder’s ability to present the competitor’s pitch deck without any prior knowledge. As the winner, Happybot.ai will join Slush 2016, a major technology startup event to be held in Helsinki. Last year, it attracted 1,700 startups and 800 investors.
