AI has the power to transform how people work, but getting tangible value from AI is not as easy as throwing AI applications in your workflow. It can be difficult for a company to understand which AI applications will help their business and which are just hype. Workhelix wants to solve that problem.
Workhelix is a technology-enabled service startup that works with businesses to better understand and monitor their AI automation. Workhelix breaks down company employee positions into specific job features, tasks and scores, and acquires each task to be suited to AI adoption. This will provide businesses with a way to build a roadmap for how and where AI is recruited, and how to monitor whether the AI they employ is working.
Co-founder and CEO James Millin told TechCrunch that many companies have mistakenly adopted AI.
“It's not a systematic, strict way to adopt generative AI, and it's part of the reason people are often disappointed,” Millin said. “But when you look at all the jobs within your organization, break them down into bundles of tasks, then acquire each task for suitability accelerated by generative AI, you can come up with a really quantitative, rigorous way to adopt it.”
Workhelix's methodology of decomposition of roles into tasks is based on years of research into the relationship between technology and productivity by Eric Brin Jolfson (above), director of Stanford's Digital Economy Lab and one of Workhelix's co-founders.
“In many cases of our work, there's this long story of the task where machines are actually not that useful,” Brynjolfson said. “There's a human need to be involved. And there are other tasks that machines can be very useful. And in almost every project we see, there are each of them.”
Brynjolfsson told TechCrunch that he has been studying this gap between technology and productivity for over a decade. Before Workhelix, Brynjolfsson shared this research and methodology through published papers or boardroom speaker gigs, but he realized that adding software elements would allow him to reach more companies.
Workhelix co-chair Brynjolfsson combined with Andrew McAfee, co-director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, and one of Brynjolfsson co-authors. Professor Wharton Daniel Rock. Mirin will release Work Helix in 2022.
The company launched its product in April 2024 and has seen strong demand from corporate customers such as Accenture, Wayfair and Coursera. Workhelix's first 12 enterprise customers went through the door with zero paid ads, Milin said.
“This is what they're really starving,” Brynjolfson said. “They have never seen anything like that before. They have consultants there, but there are no tools of these kinds. We're filling a huge gap. I think there's the biggest gap in the market.”
The company recently raised a $15 million Series A round led by AIX Ventures, with participation from Andrew NG's AI funds, Accenture Ventures and VCSs such as Bloomberg Beta. He also received funding from many angel investors, including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Openai co-founder Mira Murati, and chief scientist Jeff Dean, including Google Deepmind and Google Research.
Shaun Johnson, founding partner of AIX Ventures, told TechCrunch that he was introduced to the company through his work at Brynjolfsson at Stanford. Christopher Manning, one of AIX Ventures Investing Partners, is the director of Stanford's Institute of Artificial Intelligence. Johnson said he understands the problems the Work Helix is trying to solve immediately.
“Eric, Andy and Daniel have great access to Fortune 500 C-suites and customers,” Johnson said. “It's an extreme founder market fit, and their approach fits an extreme founder product. That's what we wanted to dive into.”
Workhelix plans to place its recently raised capital towards expanding its software track for task counts and KPIs. We will also continue to build internal tools for data scientists who will directly support enterprise customers along with Workhelix products.
In today's market, where you're so fast and obsessed with automation, it's interesting that Workhelix's business model also includes not only software but human elements. The company supports this approach, but this makes scaling difficult. That said, if it was just another software platform, the company wouldn't be that effective.
“I think there's a trillion dollar opportunity here to create value,” Brynjolfson said. “We're not going to capture everything. As James said earlier, this is the biggest technological revolution ever, and few people are thinking of unlocking the business side.”