A Drive to Make HR Phenomenal, with AI and AWS

Entrepreneurs often look up to large, successful companies for inspiration in a bid to scale up their own ventures. For Philadelphia-based serial entrepreneur Mahe Bayireddi, that inspiration has been Amazon. Across his career, Mahe has applied Amazon’s customer-centric, personalised approach to the world of human resources and talent when he co-founded Phenom - a global AI SaaS company.

Mahe was particularly inspired by the way the recommendation and personalisation engine works on Amazon in different markets and for different users. For example, the experience on Amazon is different in Germany, India, Belgium, US or elsewhere, based on localised preferences, buying behaviour, market nuances and so on. “We thought, why can’t we apply the same approach for a company which uses our product? Like pharma, logistics, manufacturing or aviation, companies operating in different geographies will have different talent needs. Talent solutions have to account for the unique needs of the industries and countries where they operate,” said Mahe, who is also the CEO of Phenom, which was founded in 2011.

The Phenom platform, powered by a personalised engine built on AI and automation, helps candidates find jobs by identifying the right fit for the role, and then the right career path and growth opportunities after they’re hired. Overall, the platform assists clients in two key aspects - talent acquisition and talent management.

“One is retaining talent and the other is growing talent. In both aspects our clients use the product to ensure that people can build purposeful careers,” said Mahe.

Interestingly, the company name has history to it. Back in the 19th century, the word Phenom was used when referring to an exceptionally talented or gifted person. In the early 20th century, a philosophical movement called Phenomenology looked at the essence of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. From these two words, the HR-focused company found the ethos of its platform — the combination of talented people and experiences led to the name Phenom.

An Entrepreneur at Heart

Mahe grew up in cities like Vijayawada and Machilipatnam (both in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh). He completed his masters in computer science in India and later pursued courses in business strategy and planning at Penn State University and Wharton, respectively.

The entrepreneurial bug bit him early as his family was into business. Mahe’s father owned a medical store and when he was just 10 years old, he would open the store and help people buy medicines. Even at that age Mahe’s curious mind could match prescriptions with diseases. For instance, from prescriptions he could make out whether the medical issue was related to heart problems, insomnia, pregnancy or other illnesses.

However, his first project was in building search infrastructure, with Lucene as foundation. This was a time when Mahe experimented a lot, trying out ventures in patient management, in the pharmaceutical space and other related areas.

In 2009 he co-founded BHSP Nexus Software Consulting, a software services and consulting startup focused on the financial services sector. He then became the CEO & Co-founder of BijaHealth which specialised in sourcing healthcare data and analytics of patient-level data from emerging markets. BijaHealth's mission was to reduce the time, cost, and uncertainty of conducting clinical trials by capitalising on the power of advanced healthcare data analytics and clinical development strategies.

In 2011, Mahe co-founded SnipSnap, an app to let consumers save printed coupons to their smartphones and redeem them in stores. The company was launched in Philadelphia and quickly grew to become one of the top mobile coupon apps — with more than 4 million users saving $100 million in the first two years of operation.

Mahe chose to either shut down or exit his previous ventures before launching Phenom in 2011. “My previous ventures involved a lot of data use to improve management of patients, doctors, pharmacists, hospitals or insurance companies. The better data you have the better services can be delivered. So, we thought, why can’t we do the same thing in HR?” he shared.

The goal was to build a purposeful company that would impact millions of people, as Phenom is doing now. The company’s purpose is to help a billion people find the right work. It accomplishes this task through an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based SaaS platform which guides talented individuals on their professional journey - transforming them from interested candidates to thriving employees, to enthusiastic brand advocates. The single platform provides companies with a unified solution built on AI that ensures they hire faster, develop better, and retain longer.

“We believe people should be happy and inspired by their jobs. That simple belief fuels our desire to transform the talent journey,” said Mahe.

Developing the AI edge

On the impact that AI will have and the disruption that was caused when ChatGPT use spread to the masses Mahe said, “we actually moved from what we used to call as deterministic models to probabilistic models. For instance, what will the next gen of AI do? How will search, personalization and recommendations change? GenAI has the capacity to take us to the next level.”

In this journey to the next level, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has proved to be a key partner for Phenom. “AWS is helping us manage our workloads,” said Mahe. SageMaker is one of the primary elements that Phenom uses. SageMaker helps in creation, training and deployment of machine learning models (ML) on cloud. For video and image analysis Phenom uses Rekognition Image, a cloud-based SaaS computer vision platform. This image recognition service detects objects, scenes, activities, landmarks, faces, dominant colours, and image quality. Rekognition also extracts text, recognizes celebrities and identifies inappropriate content in images.

Mahe explained, “there are many different areas where we use AWS infrastructure to ensure our processes are streamlined and effective in terms of how we can deliver at speed and scale.” Phenom also uses elements of Bedrock which offers a choice of foundational models from leading AI vendors, as well as AWS Lex, used for building AI chat interfaces in any application.

Phenom estimates 10x growth over the next decade and personally Mahe sees a lot more intelligence baked into systems throughout the workflows of enterprises. “A lot of functions will be automated, so people won’t need to do things that they used to. For example, we do 250 million personalized experiences for talent. Such scale can be handled a lot more easily as AI improves,” pointed out Mahe.

While building Phenom, Mahe continues to be inspired by Amazon. “It is an extremely innovative company with a very different kind of operational rigour and excellence, both in software and also in their operations. That is what I continue to aspire to learn from Amazon,” Mahe shared. 

Aside from his entrepreneurial ambitions, Mahe loves to spend time with his family. He also enjoys silent meditation, carving 12 days across the year where he breaks away from all the chatter and clutter in the world.

The human mind and AI

While he continues to look at new ways in which AI can help improve services, he doesn't really believe in Singularity (when machines have human level of intelligence). He reasoned, “the human mind is so complicated and difficult to comprehend. It expects different things at different phases and that is very difficult for a machine to comprehend.”

However, he also argues that “many jobs will be augmented, a lot of skills will be dissolved and new skills will emerge. That doesn't mean that humans won’t have work. Though the expectations that humans have will change, unemployment won’t increase,” said Mahe. Every time new technology has come in, it has led to job shifts. The same will happen with AI. New roles will emerge and humans will adapt, learning new skills and taking on new roles.

Even as AI-led shifts happen Mahe sees AWS setting the bar in technology innovations. “AWS has a very customer centric thought process — looking at what a developer, a business, a company needs and responding to that need” he said.

On his end, Mahe continues to stay updated on new AI developments by engaging with diverse experts in the field, listening to podcasts, learning from entrepreneurs, while keeping a watch on market shifts so that he is well prepared to grab new opportunities.