Founded in 2022, Cascade AI aims to deliver tailored support for enhanced employee experience through the power of AI, addressing historic issues brought about by a focus on enterprise efficiency. It counts CLEAResult, One Oncology, Boomi among its clients.

In October, the US-based startup secured a $3.75 million seed investment led by Gradient, Google’s early-stage AI fund, to take its total funding to date to $5.45 million from investors also including Myriad Venture Partners, Success Venture Partners, and AlleyCorp.

John Brazier: What is Cascade’s USP? What makes your proposition special?

Ana-Maria Constantin: We resolve the historical tension between enterprise efficiency and an exceptional employee experience.

Historically, organizations focused on efficiency would go into cost-cutting mode. Operations and financials improved, but they’d hurt the employee experience – which in turn damages productivity, retention, and enthusiasm for strategic initiatives. Or a company might nurture an amazing employee experience with great programs, educational assistance and rich benefits, but it would hurt operations – doubly so if employees didn’t use the resources the company invested in.

So what truly excites us – and I think this is revolutionary in terms of what generative AI enables organizations to do – is that we can solve for both enterprise efficiency and improving the employee experience in the same platform.

We do that by working with our employer customers to build and personalize large language models (LLMs) that pull from their entire library of HR and benefits programs and policies. We then train AI support agents on these materials, personalize those agents to each company’s tone of voice and goals, and deploy them to give employees instant, private answers to any HR-related inquiry.

What makes our platform unique is the fact that we provide bespoke AI agent personalization with plug-and-play ease. If you have documents in any digital form, you’re 80% of the way to building a fully functional AI assistant. We’re also able to integrate with other employee data from payroll, HRIS and other systems, so the responses our AI assistants offer are truly tailored to individuals. No other platform can do that.

Over the past year, our customers have seen a reduction of 50% to 85% in the number of employee inquiries that previously required manual support from HR teams.

Simultaneously, our customers are seeing more question volume – one fielded 9x more employee questions during Open Enrollment, almost all of them addressed instantly, in private, suggesting employees feel freer to ask what they need when they don’t have to talk directly to a manager.

What’s more, we’re seeing employees ask questions like ‘what’s a deductible’– the AI agents are actually teaching them about benefits and HR policies, not just answering yes-or-no to questions about resources and health coverage.

We collect all of that information in a way that preserves employee privacy – and we will always preserve that privacy — and we share an aggregate of that data with employers, so that HR teams can see in real-time what’s top of mind for employees.

Increasing access to resources, and helping to connect employees with the programs that are already there but that they may not know about, is something that has been really rewarding and meaningful for the past year.

JB: How is Cascade trying to change the world?

AMC: We chose to build a vertical AI explicitly for human resources because HR touches more business needs and impacts more lives than any other company function.

Strategic corporate initiatives like digital transformation, the ‘fourth industrial revolution’, building more globalized companies, and adapting to climate shifts cannot happen without the focused, strategy-level support of human resources.

They cannot happen without the understanding and proper training of employees. They cannot happen without enabling team agility and change management.

Gartner recently found that only 9% of HR leaders consider their functions ‘excellent’ at being both efficient and aligned with organizational needs. By allowing HR teams to shift their focus to supporting business strategies, Cascade AI empowers the functional excellence of Human Resources departments to power these transformational initiatives.

And by making HR policies easy to understand, and resources and trainings easy to find and use, we’re removing employee distractions and enabling the change management required to realize transformational corporate aspirations.

JB: What is your key message to HR leaders?

AMC: To prioritize progress over perfection and to adopt an experiment early with generative AI, because in this world things are moving very fast.

Waiting for the perfect solution would be a mistake. The effect of innovation compounds over time, so adopting early gives you an opportunity to see what’s out there, to learn, to iterate, to see what works for your team, to improve solutions over time and to ensure that you’re always staying ahead of the curve.

HR buyers are used to having very long implementation cycles, sometimes multiple months. The fact that we provide Cascade as an off-the-shelf solution, and organizations can be up and running within matter of two to four weeks at most, is something very new to most of the organizations we’re working with.

But once they overcame that initial inertia against taking action, they’ve moved incredibly fast and continue to gain momentum.

JB: What are the next strategic goals for Cascade?

AMC: Looking toward early 2025 we’re expanding agentic AI capabilities in the Cascade platform where we’re building capabilities that help employees enroll in benefits, automatically apply for leave, change their address in their system, fill out the information for time off that they’re planning to take, and more.

We’re also building advanced reporting in our platform, because our customers are large organizations that have multiple employee groups in different countries accessing different policies. So, we’re helping teams understand engagement so they can maximize the value of Cascade for each of those employee groups.

Something that’s been really interesting to see is that as HR teams bring their data into Cascade, the onboarding process helps us empower customers to do an audit of their documentation. Today, various HR policies may sit on multiple different microsites or portals internally, and it’s challenging to know when and if the information is up to date.

Performing evaluations of AI responses on top of that data has helped our customers audit their intranets and knowledge bases. So we’re actively working to expand those capabilities and ensure that HR teams at our customers’ businesses provide high quality responses to employees, and also meet all the compliance check marks to ensure that their documentation is up to date.

JB: What one trend will be top of mind for HR leaders in the next 12 months?

AMC: It’s been fantastic to see HR leading the way in enterprise AI adoption.

We’ve been around since late 2022, exactly as the industry was shifting from traditional deep learning to generative AI, and so over the past two years I’ve seen customers start AI executive boards and AI reviews boards to think about AI applications at an executive level.

For our customers, HR has been one of the first departments to adopt AI, and they’re pulled into these executive board reviews to share how they launched Cascade across all employee groups at the company.

This is a unique opportunity for HR leaders, because HR touches all business functions and more lives than any other department in your organization. Continuing to upskill your workforce by building this AI-centric culture is transformational for organizations

It’s great to see that HR was a first mover and has this leadership opportunity for continued growth.

UNLEASH Startup | Spotlight is a monthly Editorial interview series where we speak to and profile the best and brightest technology startups the HR world has to offer. Want to feature in the series? Get in touch with john@unleash.ai to find out more.