Leena AI announces voice-enabled AI ‘colleagues’ who can work alongside you – News

Leena AI Inc., the developer of an employee-facing agentic artificial intelligence assistant, today announced the launch of what it’s calling AI colleagues, which can speak out loud and listen using natural, conversational language in the workplace.

The company said its AI agents can work and interact just like human employees can and provide support across numerous work fields, including information technology, human resources, finance, marketing, sales and procurement.

Leena AI Chief Executive and co-founder Adit Jain told News in an interview that the company initially focused on building text AI, but he believes that conversational voice communication will become the next generation of work accessibility.

“Org structures today have humans reporting to humans, but that’s changing to a place where you will have AI colleagues reporting to humans and AI collaborating with humans,” said Jain.

By using natural voice communication, Jain said these agents allow workers to get work done faster than before. AI acts as a go-between for situations where text might be cumbersome or difficult, becoming more of a collaborator than a widget trapped within a screen.

“Already 35 % of all interactions with Leena are on voice… and the average time of session is seven and a half minutes,” said Jain.

Opportunities for using voice with AI agents are everywhere, such as when walking from place to place, where employees would naturally talk to one another or to their devices instead of typing on a keyboard or a screen.

For example, while driving or waiting in line, a user might say, “Leena, that director I had lunch with yesterday, I’d like to open a lead for them in Salesforce, also get information from our tech team on the deep tech question that guy asked.”

The AI agent could use Salesforce integration to access and complete the necessary forms. Next, the agent could scour meeting notes and look up information about the “deep tech information” requested, prepare an email and show it to the user before sending it to the tech team.

The AI colleagues are powered by agentic AI, meaning that they can complete tasks with little or no human input once they’re set to a goal. Although they always seek employee approval before taking action, they ensure a user-friendly experience by keeping a human in the loop before taking any critical action. They also have 24/7 availability, all year round.

“Our AI colleagues get up at eight in the morning and they have a full persona: a name, phone number, email ID, Slack and Teams profiles,” added Jain. “They’ll even ping you if they need anything.”

The agents even have a favorite sports team and additional color information to make them seem more personable. Just like regular employees, when the agent “wakes up,” it can review its notes from the previous day and resume its tasks as usual. This includes checking the calendar, reading emails and organizing various activities, just like a typical employee, to help get tedious work out of the way.

“We’re not thinking of them as our direct reports — we see them as collaboration colleagues, working with humans to get better outcomes for everyone,” Jain said. He emphasized that this is why the company refers to them as AI colleagues instead of digital employees or workers. “It’s not just a dumb workflow that says ‘My job is done.’ The expectation is that the agent runs, sees a problem and comes to a manager or colleague and says, ‘Hey, can you help me out?’”

Leena claims that initial customer reactions to the AI colleagues have been overwhelmingly positive. The chief experience officer of an unnamed major industrial company predicting that the voice-enabled agents could boost the productivity of information technology and human resources teams by almost 50%.

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