Workhelix: Guiding Enterprises Through the AI Revolution
The transformative potential of artificial intelligence in the workplace is undeniable, but realizing tangible value from AI isn’t as straightforward as simply implementing any application across an existing workflow. Many enterprises struggle to identify which AI applications will truly benefit their business and which are merely overhyped. Workhelix aims to solve this specific challenge.
Workhelix is a tech-enabled service startup that works with companies to provide a better understanding of their AI automation efforts. They dissect a company’s employee roles into precise job functions and tasks, scoring each task based on suitability for AI integration. This approach enables businesses to develop effective roadmaps for AI adoption and offers a method to monitor the effectiveness of implemented AI solutions.
James Milin, co-founder and CEO of Workhelix, told TechCrunch that many companies make critical errors in AI adoption by trying to apply AI to entire business divisions—an approach that’s too broad to deliver meaningful results. “That’s not a systematic, rigorous way to adopt generative AI and is part of the reason people are frequently so disappointed,” Milin said. “But if you look at all the jobs in an organization and break them down into bundles of tasks, and then score each task for its suitability to be accelerated by generative AI, now you can come up with a really quantitative rigorous way to adopt it.”
Workhelix’s methodology of task-based role analysis is based on years of research conducted by Erik Brynjolfsson, the director of Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab and Workhelix’s co-founder, into the relationship between technology and productivity.
“In the case of a lot of our work, there’s this long tale of tasks that the machines actually don’t help that much with,” Brynjolfsson said. “You need humans to be involved. And then there’s other tasks where the machines are very helpful. And almost every project that we look at, there’s some of each of those.”
Brynjolfsson, during an interview with TechCrunch, noted that he has been researching this dynamic between technology and productivity for over a decade. Earlier, Brynjolfsson distributed his research and methodology through published papers or public speaking engagements within boardrooms. He realized that incorporating software elements had the ability to reach a broader range of companies.
Brynjolfsson, who also serves as Workhelix’s co-chairman, partnered with Andrew McAfee, the co-director of the MIT initiative on the digital economy, and one of Brynjolfsson’s co-authors; Daniel Rock, a Wharton professor; and Milin to establish Workhelix in 2022. The company launched its product in April 2024 and has since seen strong demand from major enterprise customers, including Accenture, Wayfair, and Coursera.
According to Milin, Workhelix’s first dozen enterprise customers were secured without any paid advertising. “This is something that they’re really hungry for,” Brynjolfsson said. “They haven’t seen anything like it before. There are consultants out there, but they don’t have these kinds of tools. We’re filling a huge gap. I think the biggest gap there is in the market.”
Workhelix recently finalized a $15 million Series A funding round. The round was led by AIX Ventures and with participation from AI Fund, Accenture Ventures, and Bloomberg Beta, among others. The company also received funding from several angel investors including Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn co-founder; Mira Murati, an OpenAI co-founder; and Jeff Dean, the chief scientist at Google DeepMind and Google Research, among other investors.
Shaun Johnson, a founding partner at AIX Ventures, added that he was introduced to the company through Brynjolfsson’s work at Stanford; one of AIX Ventures’ investing partners, Christopher Manning, is the director of Stanford’s artificial intelligence laboratory. Johnson quickly understood the existing problem Workhelix was addressing. “Erik, Andy, and Daniel have amazing access to the Fortune 500 C-suite and access to customers,” stated Johnson.” It’s extreme founder-market fit and their approach is extreme founder-product fit. That caused us to want to dive in.”
Workhelix plans on allocating the newly acquired capital towards increasing the number of tasks and KPIs which their software tracks. It will also continue to enhance internal tools for their data scientists, further assisting enterprise customers alongside Workhelix’s product.
In today’s business environment, with its emphasis on accelerating automation, it’s interesting that Workhelix is built upon a business model that combines software with human interaction. The company stands firm in its approach despite it making scaling harder. Milin believes that the company would be less effective if it were just another software platform. “I think there’s trillion-dollar opportunity here to create value,” said Brynjolfsson. “Not that we’re going to capture all, or even most of that, but we want to unlock that. As James said earlier, this is the biggest technological revolution that’s ever happened and very few people are thinking about unlocking the business side of it.”
