Yva.AI
Combating Unwanted Attrition with AI

The story goes that when a former IBM CEO was asked whether he was going to fire an employee who made a mistake that cost the company $600,000, his reply was, "I just spent $600,000 training him. Why would I want somebody to hire his experience?” Today unwanted attrition is a priority for organizations given the talent crunch as well as the inordinate amount of time and resources consumed in finding, recruiting, and training another appropriate candidate.

Sensing an acute need in the industry for a viable solution that can help retain the best talent while improving performance and revenue, industry veterans Gary A. Fowler (CEO and Co-Founder) and David Yang (Chairman) co-founded Yva.AI. The company presents a one-of-a-kind, AI-powered real-time smart employee analytics and performance management system, which helps organizations save millions of dollars by predicting resignations of key employees. Both Fowler and Yang are serial entrepreneurs that bring a combined industry experience of over 50 years. Given their deep know-how and state-of-the-art AI driven-solution, it is evident why Yva.AI is gaining significant traction with industry bigwigs such as Xerox, ABBYY, and TerraLink Technologies reaching out to them.

In a recent interview with CIO Applications, Fowler delves deeper into the superior capabilities of their solution, what makes Yva.AI a cut above the rest, and gives a peek into their roadmap.

Can you give us a brief outline of Yva.AI?

Yva.AI is a Menlo Park-based firm that is dedicated to help companies retain the best talent, better engage teams, and improve overall performance. Our flagship solution is an AI-driven, people analytics and performance management system that offers unique capabilities such as predicting resignation of key employees, identifying interpersonal conflicts, presenting profound insights that increase sales by up to 15 percent while helping design success profiles of the best performer and more. Behind our next-gen product is a competent team that consists of Ph.D. holders from around the world who have deep expertise in AI, NLP, semantic search engine technologies, computational linguistics, and deep learning.

Can you throw some more light on your AI-driven system and describe its feature-rich functionalities?

Yva is based on ML and AI and tracks the behavioral patterns of employees through metadata analysis of the envelope of the email and corporate message, which is the safest and most secure method.

This can be the timestamps when emails were sent or received, the subject line in an email, or addresses in an email. Our AI-driven solution comes pretrained and is designed to analyze the changes in the metadata that are not obvious to the human eye. For example, a person who is considering resignation will exhibit subtle signs such as a change in the frequency of response and slack, which Yva instantly detects. But what is truly revolutionary is that our system grows by learning, similar to the human brain, and as a result, the more a company uses Yva, the more accurate are the results.

At its core, Yva is truly a transparent solution that is designed to benefit both employers and employees. Please elaborate on its salient features.

Through Yva, we offer a combination of subjective and objective data analysis. We input two kinds of data into our system. On the hard data side we have emails and on the soft data side, we have the responses from 360-degree surveys that are taken by employees. We project the insights revealed from this information on two kinds of dashboards. One is the manager dashboard which breaks down how employees are performing in groups, different departments, or by geography. We also have the 'my Yva dashboard' which is the employee dashboard. Employees have complete access to analyses and as an outcome, they are motivated to do better in case there is a dip in performance. These dashboards also reflect feedback from co-workers, based on the 360-degree surveys. Imagine the power of staying ahead with real-time, year-round performance reviews instead of the usual twice a year drill.

What are the few factors that make Yva a cut above other solution providers in the market?

Clearly where we hit the mark is unsupervised AI. We are one among the few companies that offer an AI system that teaches itself, a concept relatively unheard of in the HR space. Add to that the deep and extensive experience that we bring to the table, which helps us network better, reach out to more clients, and design advanced solutions. We churn out a truly holistic solution that is industry-agnostic and offers a 360-degree view of what is happening within an organization, as opposed to other solutions that work in silos.

Can you substantiate the efficiency of Yva with a few case studies to help our readers better understand your unique value proposition?

For a retail bank with 200,000 employees we are running a pilot program with them. To identify the change leaders within the company, the bank resorted to surveys to spot specific characteristics in employees. However, the surveys not only proved to be ineffectual but also time and resource consuming. Given the pace at which businesses move today, the results were slow which in turn hindered timely decision-making. Yva brings to the client the power of AI to clarify the result received from 360 degree feedback and 25,000 surveys. One major drawback of manual methods is human bias and subjectivity, which Yva completely eliminates. Moreover, the client will be able to identify hidden opinion leaders; someone with equal influence in the organization which a survey might fail to pick. The pilot is currently in progress and is scheduled to end by mid-June.

What’s in store for Yva in the near future? Walk us through your roadmap.

We have major expansion plans in the pipeline, starting from the U.S., Asia, and Europe, and we are also targeting new verticals. But overall our main mission is to constantly 'listen' to our customers and bring the right product at the right place, at the right time.