Aisera announced a $40 million Series C round of venture capital for its conversational AI and RPA focused on employee and customer experience. This brings its total raised to $74.5 million.
In its press release, Aisera describes itself as an “AI-driven service experience solution that automates operations and support for IT, Sales and customer service, making businesses and customers successful by offering consumer-like self-service resolutions to users.” Where’s the employee experience or HR in that? The PR messaging is in contrast to the messaging on its website, which delineates employee experience and HR use cases like onboarding, employee relations, candidate sourcing, screening, and scheduling, payroll, and case management – all with fairly rudimentary definitions. The videos provided on the “HR page” are examples of generic “service desk” or call center-like service workflows adapted to HR.
Aisera claims that the product “seamlessly integrates with enterprise applications like Salesforce, Oracle, Zendesk, ServiceNow, Workday, Adobe, Atlassian, and BMC.” However, the use cases are more focused on “auto-resolve tasks, actions, and workflows for IT, Customer Service, Sales, and Operations.”
Based on the founders’ track records as technologists and entrepreneurs, we do not doubt that the technology is impressive. However, today for Aisera, employee experience and HR looks more like messaging and less like experience.
There is no shortage of conversational AI and RPA focused on HR and talent that is already in the market. Leaders will want to factor in domain expertise and ongoing IT budgets and support SLAs as they consider layering conversational tech over the employee experience tech stack.
$2.7 billion was invested globally in work tech during 2021 Q1 alone. Get the free WorkTech report and analysis here.
