Ema and ADP Partner on Agentic AI for HR
Agentic AI platform Ema has entered a strategic partnership with HCM provider ADP to embed its AI agents into HR workflows. As part of the deal, ADP's venture arm led a strategic investment in Ema, signaling a push to integrate agentic automation into mainstream payroll, compensation, and benefits operations.
- Ema, founded in 2023 by former Google and Okta executives Surojit Chatterjee and Souvik Sen, refers to its product as a "Universal AI Employee." This platform uses a collection of specialized AI agents that collaborate to automate complex, end-to-end workflows within a company. - The company has raised a total of $61 million in funding over three rounds. Its Series A funding totaled $50 million, with participation from investors like Accel, Section 32, Prosus Ventures, and Hitachi Ventures. - Ema's technology is built on a proprietary model called EmaFusion™, which intelligently combines over 100 large language models to select the best one for a specific task based on accuracy and cost. This allows users to create AI "personas" for various roles without needing to code. - Agentic AI in HR can automate tasks like resume screening, payroll processing, benefits administration, and answering employee policy questions. This is intended to free up HR professionals to focus on more strategic initiatives. - ADP launched its corporate venture arm, ADP Ventures, in October 2023 to invest in early-stage tech startups that align with its innovation strategy in the HCM space and beyond. - Prior to this partnership, ADP had already integrated AI into its offerings with a solution called ADP Assist. This tool uses generative AI to help with payroll, create analytics reports from natural language queries, and provide a conversational interface for employees to self-serve information. - The partnership aims to embed Ema's AI agents directly into ADP's ecosystem, which serves over one million clients and 41 million wage earners globally. This will allow ADP clients to leverage Ema's "AI Employees" for tasks across the entire hire-to-retire lifecycle.
