“Isn't Evie joining us for the meeting today?” was a common refrain when guests visited the Evie.AI office, a Singapore-based company that created Evie, touted as ‘the world’s best AI recruitment assistant’. It was also a compliment that underscored its high-tech and human qualities as it took on tasks that its human co-workers found tedious and time-consuming – the scheduling of meetings.

Jin Hian Lee, Evie.ai’s co-founder, used to work at Yahoo as a product manager and had to spend much time coordinating large meetings that involved not only many participants across departments and organisations, but also those working from around the world.

Lee thought, “Why don’t I create an app to do this?”. He was trained at Stanford as an electrical engineer, but he had received no formal training in Artificial Intelligence (AI). He eventually left Yahoo in 2013 and founded Eve.ai the following year.

Conceived in 2014 and launched in 2016, Evie began strictly as a scheduling assistant. It achieved a modest measure of success and became popular with expatriates based in Asia. By 2018, its clients included Carousell, Zopim (now part of Zendesk) and technology recruitment firm, Hacker Trail.

It was in the HR space where Evie eventually found its niche with head-hunters and recruiters, particularly with the task of scheduling interviews and meetings between their clients and job candidates. Evie could read and write in natural language when responding to requests, in addition to resolving scheduling issues, all by email.

Effortless scheduling at scale

Lee realised that he needed to scale the startup in order to grow. He and his team tweaked Evie to make it convenient for organisations to integrate Evie rapidly ‘out of the box’ with established platforms, such as Microsoft Office 365, Teams, Taleo, G Suite, Zoom, SAP, Slack and Workday. They built Evie following a ‘no code’ approach, so that the technology teams in client organisations could fine tune the specifications to bring Evie into their enterprise systems as quickly and easily as possible.

At about this time, Siemens was undergoing an enterprise-wide digital transformation to pivot its businesses toward fresh growth sectors, such as healthcare and renewable energy. Instead of waiting for applications to arrive at its doorstep, it became more proactive, constantly on the lookout for prospective candidates and engage them early in the hiring process.

Talent acquisition at volume

With its global footprint, Siemens is an industrial engineering company with a diverse workforce. As of 2015, it employed 340,000 people and its volume of new hires was about 32,000 per year. By 2020, it was receiving about 2.2 million job applications and new hires had grown to about 35,000 a year. This level of complexity meant an opportunity for Evie, which came in 2018 when Siemens sought to free HR support staff from tedious routine and low-value work, such as scheduling interviews.

This opportunity turned out to be game-changing for Evie, as Siemens was willing to customise Evie to suit the needs of its recruiters. This attitude was a departure from the majority of Singapore firms, which preferred a ‘plug and play’ approach. Lee and his team worked closely with Siemens’s UK recruitment team through an intense co-development cycle that took six months, with several iterative redesigns and refinements. Recruiters would continually test the current version of Evie and provide feedback as to how it should evolve to fit their needs.

By January 2019, Siemens had a flexible and unified tool to manage talent acquisition from end to end, but also had one that could function on a global scale. This was particularly important during the COVID-19 pandemic when travel restrictions, lockdowns, and work-from-home were imposed across the globe. The close collaboration with Siemens in HR recruiting automation helped raise the productivity of the company’s recruitment processes by as much as 30 percent.

A new frontier

As of 2020, Evie was used in 40 countries and over 400 companies. Its experience with Siemens showed Lee that the start-up needed to move aggressively into the human capital management (HCM) space. In 2020, the global HCM solutions market – which involves recruiting, training, payroll, compensation and performance management – was estimated to be worth about US$30 billion. Also, Evie’s role showed that the tool can be an AI ‘co-worker’ that augmented, not replaced, its fellow human colleagues. The question would be how Evie should evolve next.

In addition, Lee also sought to be closer to the US venture capital market. He joined a programme that helped him to identify fundraising opportunities and access mentors familiar with the Silicon Valley. Lee appreciated the exposure to the Silicon Valley ethos as he was developing Evie into an AI tool that works with humans across a wider spectrum of talent management.

This case “Evie.ai: Charting the Career of an AI Personal Assistant” is written by Associate Professor of Strategy & Entrepreneurship David Gomulya of the Lee Kong Chian School of Business, and Associate Director Dr Wee-Kiat Lim of the Centre for Management Practice at the Singapore Management University, as well as Associate Professor Damien Joseph at the Nanyang Technological University. To read it in full, please visit the CMP website by clicking here.