On the Talent Hunt: AI chatbots for staff built by my startup help us work smarter and attract new staff

I started Pand.ai in 2016 to create artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots that enable firms improve operational efficiency and advertising effectiveness. We have 16 comprehensive-time employees across Singapore and Malaysia.

As a startup, we struggled with manpower difficulties from day just one. At first, our biggest issue was to encourage talent to not only join an unknown startup, but to also settle for a reduce income than the large multinationals.

The pandemic exacerbated this trouble as demand from customers for nearby tech talent shot up.

This was specifically demanding from mid-2021 until eventually March 2022.

With insufficient manpower, we ended up typically forced to change away business enterprise opportunities, specially all those overseas.

Several of our staff members have been also asked to use numerous hats.

To our shock, our youthful workers welcomed this as they get to embark on an accelerated job path, exposed to much more “higher-amount things” than they would if not knowledge in identical positions at other companies.

In terms of processes, we also came up with “AI employee” chatbots to make improvements to our productivity.

We already had the specialized know-how to create subtle AI equipment, so it did not choose very long for our engineers to make an AI chatbot that solved a single of our individual problems: Managing myriad human resource-similar issues.

This chatbot makes it possible for all staff members to use for depart and submit promises from possibly their Slack or WhatsApp app at any time.

It checks for the validity of each submission (these types of as guaranteeing an employee has sufficient depart), sends it to the ideal manager for approval, and at the conclusion of the thirty day period, sends a self-produced analytics report to administration for evaluate.

We afterwards designed extra “AI employees” chatbots to aid the group, from undertaking administration and bug tracking to report technology and employees’ compliance teaching.

These chatbots lessen the workload for our staff members, thus letting them to emphasis on greater value things to do.

Nowadays, we are no lengthier dealing with a labour crunch in our core business enterprise. Our “AI employees” chatbots truly make us far more beautiful to future staff members.

Candidates informed us in the course of interviews that they were interested to perform with us for the reason that they located us to be “awesome” mainly because of the “AI employee” chatbots we crafted.

We were able to hire 5 a lot more staff, which includes three software package engineers, in the past 6 months alone.

Our manpower shortfall now arrives completely from our new enterprise-to-consumer unit presenting an coverage broker chatbot support to support end users come across coverage goods.

We established up the unit less than four months ago and are wanting for two application developers and one business enterprise chief.

We want to seek the services of people with prior coverage-tech knowledge, and this expertise pool is considerably smaller, which is why we are still struggling with a shortage in this unit.

Other than “AI employees” chatbots, an additional a single of our “secret weapons” to plugging the manpower hole is interns.

Gen Z interns are frequently really expert, so we address them as equivalent staff customers and give them true perform. A number of of our full-time staff members (such as a crew lead) started out with us as interns.

ABOUT THE Author:

Chuang Shin Wee, 44, is the founder and main executive officer of house-grown startup Pand.ai, which builds artificial intelligence chatbots for enterprises functioning across Southeast Asia.

If you are a enterprise owner with an expertise to share or know somebody who needs to add to this series, create to voices [at] mediacorp.com.sg with your whole identify, deal with and cellphone range.