AI has the power to transform people’s work, but obtaining tangible value from AI is not as easy as throwing AI applications in any workflow. It is difficult for enterprises to find out which AI applications help in their activities and which are simply noise. Workhelix wants to solve this problem.
Selix Workhelix It is a service startup with technology support that works with enterprises to higher understand and monitor the automation of artificial intelligence in their companies. Workhelix spreads the position of the company’s worker into specific work and task functions and assesses every task of its usefulness for accepting AI. This helps companies build road maps, how and where to accept AI and gives enterprises a way to monitor if they adopt AI.
Co -founder and general director of James Milin told Techcrunch that many companies were incorrectly accepted for AI adoption because they need to apply AI to all activities, which is too wide to find value.
“This is not a systematic, rigorous way to accept generative artificial intelligence and is one of the reasons why people are often disappointed,” said Milin. “But if you look at all work in the organization and divide them into task packages, and then you get any task to make its suitability to accelerate by generative artificial intelligence, now you can come up with a really quantitative rigorous way of adopting them.”
The Workhelix methodology involving the breakdown of roles in tasks is based on years of research on the relationship between technology and efficiency of Erik Brynjolfsson (pictured above), director of the Digital Stanford economy laboratory and Workhelix co -founders.
“In the case of many of our works, there is a long story about tasks in which machines do not really help,” said Brynjolfsson. “You need people to get involved. And then there are other tasks in which the machines are very helpful. And almost every project we look at is some of them. “
Brynjolfsson told Techcrunch that he has been studying this division between technology and performance for over a decade. Before Workhelix, Brynjolfsson shared these research and methodology through published articles or speaker live shows in board rooms, but he realized that if they add a software element, they might reach more companies.
Brynjolfsson, also co -chairman of Workhelix, joined Andrew McAfee, co -director of the MIT initiative on digital economy, and one of the co -authors of Brynjolfsson; Daniel Rock, Professor Wharton; and Milin to start Workhelix in 2022.
The company launched its product in April 2024 and recorded high demand from enterprise clients, including Accenture, Wayfair and Courser, among others. Milin said that the first dozen Enterprise customers passed through several dozen corporate clients with zero paid promoting.
“This is something that they are really hungry,” said Brynjolfsson. “They didn’t see anything like that. There are consultants, but they don’t have this kind of tools. We fill the huge gap. I think the biggest gap is on the market. “
The company has recently collected a round of $ 15 million and under the leadership of AIX Ventures with the participation of the AI Andrew NG fund, Accenture Ventures and Bloomberg Beta, including VC. He also received funds from many investors of angels, including co -founder LinkedIn Reid Hoffman, co -founder of Opeli Mira Murati and Jeff Dean, the major scientist at Google Deepmind and Google Research.
Shaun Johnson, founder’s partner Aix Ventures, told Techcrunch that he was presented to the company through the work of Brynjolfsson in Stanford; One of the investment partners of Aix Ventures, Christopher Manning, is the director of the Artificial Intelligence Stanford laboratory. Johnson said he understood that Paint Point Workhelix tried to solve immediately.
“Erik, Andy and Daniel have amazing access to Fortune 500 C-Suite and access to customers,” said Johnson. “This is an extreme matching of the founder-Rynek, and their approach is the extreme matching of the founder-producer. This caused us to dive. “
Workhelix plans to make recently collected capital to increase the number of tasks and mocks its software works. It will even build internal tools for data scientists that directly help corporate clients with the Workhelix product.
On today’s market, which is obsessed with fast and automation, it is interesting that the Workhelix business model is not only software, but also accommodates a human element. The company stands on this approach, although it hinders scaling. This is because the company wouldn’t be so effective if it was one other software platform, said Milin.
“I think there is an opportunity here with a value of dollars to create a value,” said Brynjolfsson. “Not that we intend to capture all and even most of them, but we want to unlock it. As James said earlier, this is the biggest technological revolution that has ever happened and very few people think about unlocking her business side. “