For this episode of the #HRTechChat, our guest was Melissa Swisher, chief revenue officer of Socrates.ai. To say Socrates.ai is an artificially intelligent chatbot to tie together various domains of the enterprise software ecosystem is probably the most straightforward description.  The description implies only a small sliver of Socrates.ai's potential application. Some of these domains themselves may have chatbots specific to various proprietary software, and Socrates.ai an draw information from it all.

As Melissa elaborated during our chat, Socrates.ai "is an employee experience platform. Think of it as an experience layer" that hews to employees' preferences. My take is this: Think of it as a prosthetic to facilitate a unified experience in employee self-service as this pertains not just to staff's employment, but to anything they wish or need to know over the course of a given workday. In my experience, ESS for human capital management specifically offers a rich potential vein of return on investment, and I can only imagine that this ROI grows exponentially when applied to more of the employee experience. Melissa and I delved into some interesting numbers around newfound efficiencies deployments of Socrates.ai have produced.

Naturally, because of the solution's relations to AI, our conversation expanded beyond Socrates.ai itself. And, as mentioned during the chat, I really wish something like Socrates.ai had been available to me much earlier in my career, when I worked with a team at civil engineering firm to figure out what the company had done, in its past, that was relevant to the many responses to request for proposals we drafted. A prosthetic to identify and pull that information from within the depths of the company's enterprise would have been nice.

Then again, it was 2003, not 2021 -- the age of AI. We've come a long way, and I encourage everyone to listen this episode.