AI-Coach with Artificial Emotional Intelligence (AEI)

Passing an interview is challenging and heavily relies on the recruiter's impression. This poses a huge challenge for minorities and immigrants to pass interviews and be hired due to the lack of culture fit, socio-emotional skills, language barriers and, unfortunately, low level of DEI and recruiter’s bias -  surveys suggest that when assessing individuals, 85% to 97% of professionals rely to some degree on intuition or a mental synthesis of information.  A large body of academic research has found that the majority of hiring managers display bias against underrepresented minorities.

Over 2 million highly-skilled immigrants (only in the US!) are either underemployed or unemployed due to barriers to career advancement. These barriers include, but are not limited to lack of employer recognition, lack of cultural literacy, and the language barrier.  Additionally, 84% of the workforce insists job candidates must demonstrate soft skills that make the requirements for employment much higher and the landscape more competitive for immigrants seeking jobs. This challenge is further exacerbated by the lack of comprehensive interview preparation tools, which should include analysis and recommendations for not only text but also video and audio to assess performance and behavior. Sessions with real Career Coaches are often unaffordable for the majority of immigrants with limited resources, money and time.

AI-Career Coach is a ChatBot that operates as an assistant in messengers such as Slack and Discord. It’s integrated with Simpleem Interaction-Analysis Platform with AEI which is trained on 1B parameters from 10,000+ real business meetings and interviews to identify win/lose patterns with 94% accuracy. It digitizes ALL interactions (personality, emotions, body language, gestures, reactions, tone/pace/loudness of voice, text) and correlates them with concrete interview or conversation results, helping to identify the most impactful patterns for better outcomes.

Quick start:

• AI-Coach is a product of Simpleem, so the first step is to create a Simpleem account to access features of the Interaction-Analysis Platform and Artificial Emotional Intelligence.

• After signing in, users should connect Simpleem’s account to their messaging app (Slack, Telegram, Discord) using the provided instructions, which takes 1-2 minutes.

• For maximum efficiency, we suggest connecting Simpleem with the Video Conference Services (VCS) account for group analysis features and setting them up following our instructions, which takes 3-5 minutes. Simpleem provides integrations with Zoom, Webex, GMeet, MSTeams, as well as a direct video recording feature in the browser.

How AI Coach works:

• Users can start a conversation with an AI-Coach as they would with a career coach and ask any question relating to communication, pitching, interviews, or self-presentation preparation. AI-Coach provides answers and actionable guidance that helps users to start preparation from concrete steps.

• Navigating in the menu of the Simpleem AI-Coach chat, users get access to tools that are designed specifically to improve self-presentation, confidence, self-awareness and other soft skills to execute like a professional during business or career communication.

• As a first step users can record and analyze their presentation or pitch and receive a full deep analysis of its efficiency and concrete recommendations on what they should change in behavior to make pitch better for outcomes.

• The next step could be mock interview practice with friends or colleagues to simulate real conversation and assess audience reactions. This step helps users to understand which cues and patterns have the greatest impact on conversation and how to improve interactions for better impression.

• Another feature is daily practice of pitching in the challenging Game designed to train users’ pitching execution and automate win patterns for every conversation.

We developed an AI-Coach after showcasing our AEI technology as a Pitching Game at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023. Our aim was to support job-seeking minorities and underrepresented entrepreneurs facing challenges with self-presentation, finding a recruiter or business partner in the US, and coping with cultural and language barriers. In the game, users had one minute to pitch, aiming to avoid mistakes. Artificial Emotional Intelligence (AEI) analyzed interactions in real-time, with users losing if they received two or more red flags, even if their pitch was shorter than one minute. An impressive 32% of winners across various races and genders succeeded after their 2nd attempt or more, indicating that our Simpleem AI system enabled participants to learn and improve results with each try.

Encouraged by positive feedback and statistics, we developed a data-driven and unbiased AI-coach to assist underrepresented non-native speaking minorities striving to establish their careers or businesses remotely as well as in-person in the US. Our goal is to elevate their standard of living and promote real diversity and inclusion values as a new norm in both the workplace and society. On the other hand, we offer Simpleem AEI to businesses to reduce recruiter bias, employee turnover, and burnout. Thus we fulfill our mission to facilitate positive synergy in society and empower individuals to overcome social and communication barriers that may seem insurmountable.

Simpleem’s team consists of non-native speaker immigrants who struggled to communicate with partners, raise investments and sell products in the USA in the beginning of the company launch (2021). Before that Anastasiya managed global teams of EMEA countries at TikTok Ltd. and tried to enhance the performance and engagement of international team members helping them to be promoted. She also participated in the recruiting process to hire external candidates, the majority of whom were from minority groups. They demonstrated low self-confidence, and many of them had low levels of soft skills. This journey and personal barriers in business conversations inspired Anastasiya to design an AI solution for improving soft skills, pitching, and behavior to build rapport and succeed in career paths as well as in private life.

Leonty is a scientific researcher with previous entrepreneurship experience. Being mostly a person who sits in a Lab and communicates mostly with lab equipment and computers for calculations, his relationship-building skills were far from perfect. Moreover, he is a non-native speaker, so it was hard to understand the "rules" for different countries. For example, even to publish scientific papers in an American scientific journal, he needed to pay specific people from the US to adapt his language in the paper. It has been several years since it was a big challenge to scale a career without a network even in science. But in 2015, he made a scientific discovery that could be a great foundation for a startup and decided to overcome his low confidence and communicate with new people from different areas, from aviation to investments. It was a hard path, but this allowed him to improve technology, find the right people, and sell his technology to an Airbus Supplier in 2019. For years of hard self-working and self-overcoming on soft and communication skills opened new horizons, and he decided to create something that allows people like himself, without innate high soft skills, to overcome social barriers more easily and faster.

We already have Enterprise solutions in the Scale Stage, but for B2C customers, we've just launched a new product due to high inbound demand since September 2023 after TC Disrupt 2023. We launched an AI-coach with Slack integration powered by already existing and trained AI technology Simpleem AEI. We have acquired 20+ users, including multinational and non-speaking women, job seeker candidates, and minority groups' nations.

Network expansion:

We are seeking support in GTM, expertise in scaling, and help with spreading the word about Simpleem AI-Coach among relevant groups that truly need this B2C solution worldwide, especially in regions such as LATAM, APAC, South Asia, and Africa. We aim to connect with organizations, communities, and individuals who can benefit from our AI-Coach solution, particularly in underrepresented regions and demographics. Our goal is to collaborate with partners who can help us reach a wider audience and maximize the positive impact of our technology on individuals and communities worldwide.

Scientific research and publications: 

To accomplish our expanding solution’s goals, we need to conduct scientific research and publish findings. We are looking for research support to provide more accurate and safe support. We are seeking scientific groups and institutes as partners to research the social, behavioral, and economic impact using Artificial Emotional Intelligence.

The Core of AI-Coach service is the Artificial Emotional Intelligence (AEI) system that objectively evaluates success potential by correlating behavioral patterns with real interview outcomes. AI models trained on 1 billion parameters from over 10,000 real business video calls. The innovative approach is our Correlation Builder: a unique AI algorithm compares behavioral signals (emotions, body language, voice, and words) with meeting results, identifying win/lose patterns with the highest 94% accuracy. This highlights impactful flags and guides how to build strong relationships.

There are no solutions offering unique combinations of proprietary AI development, integration of video, audio, and text, specific segment focus, and ready-to-use software.

The simplicity is the key - you need to spend 10-15 min once to set up and then you can chat with an AI coach with messages via the most popular platforms like Slack, Telegram and Discord that are familiar to everyone.

While indirect competitors do exist, they lack either direct implementation into real-world data, necessary integrations with business software, or focus primarily on text analysis or log-file analysis. AEI's emotion measurements are based on global scientific research and a survey conducted by Paul Ekman. We utilize Universal Emotions for behavioral analysis, which are adapted to specific use cases based on internal empirical data. Note: a Universal Emotion is an emotion that is associated with a single facial expression across cultures. 

Moreover, AEI works like a human and makes sense of various facial expressions by relying on context and past experience.and adapted to specific use cases. AEI interprets facial expressions using context and past experience, similar to human cognition, aiding in emotion prediction.

The COVID-19 pandemic instigated the rapid shift to remote work and virtual interactions, constituting a new normal of professional interaction over information and communication technologies (ICT), such as video conferencing platforms, email, and mobile devices. 

While ICT may provide many benefits for remote work, such as flexibility, reductions in travel time, and geographical interaction, ICT may also contribute to increases in job strain, reductions in social interactions, and the decline of mental health. 

While reliance on ICT for remote work interactions is becoming the new normal of organizational activity, scholarly appreciation of the stages in which employees, particularly educators, enact interactions over ICT is limited. 

Simpleem aimed to dive deeply into virtual human interactions, convert intangibles as behavioral cues into measurable data, and find an evidence-based solution that enables adaptation to a new era of hybrid collaboration and achieving social synergy in this new world. AI-Coach will complement and power human interactions and help people to overcome geographical, cultural, and social barriers by combining AI technologies and behavioral science, achieving concrete improvements with issues like Zoom fatigue, job strain, reductions in social interactions, decline in mental health, and other barriers to equality and social synergy.

Our solution’s mission is to help society achieve positive synergy and enable individuals to navigate through social and communication barriers that seem impassable. Our goals are to help millions of immigrants and underrepresented groups overcome challenges with culture and language barrier via providing equal learning opportunities by AI Coach that are accessible for all.  We are aiming to significantly improve the level of their living conditions and provide equal opportunities for everybody.

Several specific metrics that we measure:

• Goal: Overcome the scare and self-doubt of underrepresented groups to apply for jobs in TOP employers and scale their business globally.
  Metric: results of Monitoring AI-Coach users number of sent applications to new jobs, accelerators or traction of new markets scaling (for entrepreneurs)

• Goal: improve communication and relation building skills that have real impact on career and business results.
  Metric: results of tracking skills dynamics before and after using AI coach and monitor conversion rate of interviews, business conversations or pitching at events into job-offers, signed deals and industry recognition

• Goal: achieve adoption to remote and hybrid collaboration to improve mental health, reduce stress and life-time balance.
  Metric: results of direct measurement of users emotional and behavioral state during virtual collaboration with AEI combined with surveys tracking NPS and career results.

We utilize methodologies and technologies from various fields of Computer Science including Computer Vision (CV) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to achieve the highest performance.

For AI-Coach, we apply advanced and trained LLM models integrated with Simpleem’s AEI technology, Correlation Builder, and Interaction-analysis Platform.

1. The best evidence that our technology works is existing customers and their reviews which you can find on our website, G2 Platform and Verified Status of CB Insights (Analyst Briefing Submitted). 

2. The other evidence are honors and awards that you can find on our website or links below:

• Global Recognition Award for pioneering work in the field of Artificial Emotional Intelligence (AEI) in 2024 (GRA)

• Most Innovative Global Interaction-Analysis AI Company (Corporate Vision)

• Top 30 AI startups (TechCrunch)

• 20 notable AI companies from TC Disrupt 2023 (Japanese Media)

• The Best AI Sales Tool for Meetings in 2023 

• Must Known AI Tools for Revenue Leaders

For further evidence, feel free to book a Demo and we will demonstrate how it works based on our video call.

3 full-time staff including 2 founders

4 part-time contractors 

2 advisors

3 years of AEI technology and Simpleem Platform development, with less than 3 months dedicated to building the AI-Coach solution for individuals.

Our team is 100% remote and consists of individuals from diverse cultures and countries (3 different countries). The management team comprises 50% female managers. This diversity allows our management team to build effective business processes while also supporting team wellbeing, taking into consideration the peculiarities of multinational collaboration and the challenges of time zone differences. Additionally, Simpleem’s team members facilitate effective collaboration and are willing to assist, even if it means working overtime due to different time zones. We value individual differences and strive to demonstrate openness and foster a diverse environment for newcomers through our example.

Simpleem is a growing AI R&D company that has been operating since 2021, developing proprietary models and providing solutions and services to large enterprises’ HR, Sales, and Education departments for identifying win/lose patterns in behavior and correlating them with outcomes. We achieved global recognition and were awarded as the Most Innovative Global Interaction-Analysis AI Company in 2023 and won Global Recognition Award for pioneering work in the field of Artificial Emotional Intelligence (AEI) in 2024. Following our recognition at TechCrunch by global multinational visitors and participants of our demo game, we decided to create a B2C solution based on trained models accessible to all.

We offer subscription and usage-based licenses for an AI SaaS solution designed to improve soft skills, self-presentation, and cultural barriers for individuals from minority groups, aiding them in succeeding in business and career-building negotiations in the USA. Our services help candidates enhance their pitching skills with actionable insights to understand their strengths and weaknesses objectively, fostering self-confidence. Our main goals include:

• Facilitating successful hiring and onboarding processes in new employment environments.

• Significantly improving their quality of life by reducing inequality and bias.

• Achieving success in business communication, meeting goals, building rapport, and navigating challenges as effectively as native speakers.

Simpleem is primarily bootstrapped and already a profitable company, experiencing rapid growth at a 43% Compound Monthly Growth Rate (CMGR) over the last 12 months. We plan to sell our solution via subscription with usage-based add-ons to generate revenue for business expansion. Additionally, we are seeking grants for social and scientific research to evaluate the impact of our solutions and enhance their effectiveness for our customers. On the other hand, we are open to partnerships and collaborations with organizations and sponsors who are going to sponsor our implementation for specific groups to make our solution free for them.