Copyright SiliconANGLE News
Leena AI Inc., the developer of voice-enabled, agentic artificial intelligence assistants for the back office, announced today that it’s launching a studio tool that enables businesses to build and tailor their assistants to automate everyday tasks. Leena’s AI agents work alongside employees and interact just like another peer, thus their name: AI colleagues. With this update, Leena is releasing AI Colleague Studio. The tool allows enterprise customers to quickly build, test and deploy personalized AI agents that can be customized to the distinct needs of a business. “There’s going to be a future where you’re going to have AI colleagues reporting to humans and working with other AI colleagues and humans like colleagues,” co-founder and Chief Executive Adit Jain told SiliconANGLE in an interview. “It’s not going to be where you just throw work over the wall — it’s going to be more collaborative.” The company is offering this catalog of pre-built AI colleagues, including five brand-new solutions pre-configured for common business roles across human resources, information technology and finance. Customers can tailor these colleagues or design entirely new ones without needing significant development experience. Leena said that with the new solution, companies can go live with fully automated, conversational AI systems that exhibit personality across numerous business roles in less than two weeks on average. Among the newly announced prebuilt solutions, customers will be able to deploy a time management specialist, an HR operations specialist, a recruitment operations associate, an IT operations coordinator and a finance operations analyst. In the platform, AI colleagues are personified in their presentation to the organization. Each one has a name, role, preferences and memory. This allows them to learn, adapt and function more like team members than tools. The objective is to make them easier to adopt and integrate into existing social interactions with human users by supporting natural, genuine feeling conversations. The AI agents can also be given workday routines, such as “waking up” in the morning, executing recurring tasks and reporting progress alongside human peers. Each AI colleague has a human “manager” whom it reports to for oversight. When a process fails or data is ambiguous, the system automatically escalates the issue to that person for clarification or approval. The company’s AI colleagues can communicate over text and voice, reaching employees through Slack, Microsoft Teams and other enterprise channels. They’re also capable of generating reports, summaries, spreadsheets and other deliverables typically handled by back-office staff. Although Leena isn’t the only company to provide AI agents branded as co-workers, Jain said real-world enterprise works cross-application. Humans act as “glue” between different apps and data sources, interpreting policy, finding missing data and coordinating across teams. “Work does not happen in any one application…. Humans are the glue between so many different siloed applications,” Jain explained. “We don’t need humans for that anymore. AI colleagues are more than intelligent to handle the entire stack of this and give them time back to do something more fulfilling.” He contrasted Leena’s neutral, multiplatform approach with single-vendor ecosystems such as ServiceNow Inc. or SAP SE. Because those platforms lack native integrations, Jain added, customers risk lock-in and limited automation. Leena’s independence allows its AI colleagues to work across systems. AI Colleague Studio features numerous deep connections for multiple systems-of-record and data sources, including SAP, ServiceNow, Workday Inc., Salesforce Inc., Oracle Corp. and Automatic Data Processing Inc. Because of the lack of native integrations on those platforms, Jain said, customers face risks of lock-in and limited automation. On the other hand, Leena’s independence enables its AI tools to operate across various systems. “I think the best investment a chief information officer can make right now in agent tech has to be independent,” Jain said. We are that independent organization.” Since launching AI colleagues in July, nearly two-thirds of Leena’s customers have shifted to the new personalized AI platform. The company anticipates nearly complete migration within six months, except for a few highly regulated clients. Jain said that although Leena is starting with 20 out-of-the-box AI colleague jobs, he projects that in the future, the most laborious tasks will disappear. The company intends to automate as much work for employees as possible. “We want to be in a place where a lot of the repetitive work that the back office does goes away in the next three, four years… across all the 100, 150 odd individual contributor job roles in the back office,” Jain said. Guarav Sharda, chief technology officer at transportation company Beacon Mobility, said integrating Leena’s AI colleagues provided a practical step towards enterprise-scale AI. “Their AI Colleague Studio turns complex Standard Operating Procedures into natural-language automation — helping us accelerate our agentic AI journey from pilots to production,” he added. Image: Microsoft Designer/SiliconANGLE
