HRTech Interview With Jeet Mukerji, CEO at Kinfolk
Jeet Mukerji, CEO at Kinfolk, shares more about the platform’s recent funding and what’s making waves in modern HRtech in this Q&A with HRTech Series:
_________
Hi Jeet take us through the story and journey behind Kinfolk and tell us about your recent funding?
My co-founder Kim and I never set out to start an “HR tech” company. We were just interested in answering: “how do you help people do their best work, and remove the day-to-day friction that gets in the way.
Every company has it. Leave requests, payroll questions, policy lookups, access issues, employment letters, updating information. Small things individually, but constant, and it really adds up as a company grows.
We started noticing this pattern when we were both managers ourselves. The same kinds of questions and operational tasks kept surfacing. And when we spoke to HR leaders, we heard the same thing again and again: huge amounts of time going into coordination work – preventing that team from doing what they signed up to do, which is, again, helping people do their best work.
To cope, companies had no choice but to layer on ticketing tools, usually borrowed from IT, or just run everything through an inbox. The work gets organized, but it still needs chasing, nudging, and manual updates.
The more we looked into it, the clearer it became that the issue was not really just about better ticketing or better knowledge bases; it needs a way to escape the ticket altogether. That pushed us to explore whether there was a different way this work could run, and with the advent of AI agents, things really accelerated.
Over the past year we started seeing good momentum, including 5x growth, as companies began moving off or augmenting systems like ServiceNow HR Service Delivery, Zendesk, and Jira. That led to our $7 million seed round, which we are using to keep building the platform and expand what People teams can automate.
Can you share more about the current state of HRTech and how new age HRTech is innovating HR operations?
For a long time HRTech was built around systems of record. Platforms that store employee data, manage payroll, track performance. They were designed primarily for compliance and administration, and largely for HR to use.
But the reality inside most companies is that a lot of day-to-day people operations work happens outside those systems. Questions, requests, approvals, and coordination between employees, managers, and different teams. HR ends up stitching that work together manually, often relying on ticketing tools or inboxes just to keep track of it.
What we are seeing now is a shift toward systems of execution. Instead of just storing information or organizing requests, new HRTech is starting to complete the work behind those requests. AI can run workflows across systems, surface the right policies, and enable employees to resolve many things themselves with the right oversight.
That changes the operating model for HR operations. The goal is no longer to manage queues more efficiently, but to remove the queue altogether. HR moves from manually coordinating work to orchestrating it, while the operational layer runs in the background.
What about the current state of HR ops needs a complete automated shift in your view?
A lot of HR operations today still rely on manual coordination, and that model is starting to show its limits.
The volume alone is significant. In growing companies there are hundreds of small operational tasks each week across onboarding, exits, leave changes, policy questions, letters, and access issues.
At the same time, employees do not think in departments. They think “I have a problem and need it solved.” But those problems often span HR, payroll, and IT, while most technology is still built around departmental silos. HR ends up sitting in the middle, stitching the work together across tools and teams.
Take employee onboarding as an example. To an employee, it’s one event. But inside the company, it’s a combination of several tickets across IT, security, Payroll and HR. HR ends up being the ‘human API’ manually gluing these systems together. That is the layer that needs to shift. We need to stop treating these as separate departmental tasks and start treating them as a single, fluid workflow.
Then you add rising expectations from employees, who are used to things being resolved instantly in most parts of their digital lives, while HR teams themselves are not scaling headcount at the same pace as the business.
Put those things together and it becomes clear that much of the operational layer of HR work should not require a human in the loop anymore. Automation can handle the repetitive coordination so HR teams can focus on the parts of the job that require judgment, context, and human connection.
Catch more HRTech Insights: HRTech Interview with Bernard Barbour, Chief Technology and Product Officer at Skillsoft
We’d love to hear about some of the most exciting innovations in HRTech from the global HRTech landscape that have piqued your interest off late and why?
One development I find particularly interesting is the shift from reactive agents to signal driven ones. HR work is not just request driven. It is about maintaining data hygiene, spotting inconsistencies, or triggering actions when something changes in the system. We are starting to see agents that monitor those signals and trigger workflows themselves.
A related development is agents that help identify what should be automated next. Instead of HR teams having to map processes themselves, the technology can look at patterns to surface where the friction is and recommend what to automate.
Finally, there is a shift happening outside of HR, where agents no longer need to rely on API-based automation. A lot of systems still limit what you can automate because you are constrained by their APIs. New approaches allow software to operate interfaces the way a human would, completing actions across systems that were previously closed off.
If these capabilities mature, HR operations capacity could increase dramatically.
For HR and business teams looking to optimize and automate more of their HR operations, what top thoughts come to mind?
I think HR teams need to think and act a bit more like product teams.
Your end users are employees, and your job is to help them achieve what they are trying to do as quickly and clearly as possible. When you look at HR operations through that lens, the question becomes: “how do we support every employee at scale without adding more process?”
That starts with measuring the work. Understanding what requests come in, where time is spent, and which tasks repeat again and again. Once you can see that clearly, you have a baseline for deciding what should stay human and what should be automated.
We see many teams wanting to adopt automation and AI because it feels like the right direction. But if it is not tied to measurable improvements in speed or capacity, it becomes hard to understand the real ROI.
Another practical step is to try automating something small yourself. Even a simple experiment helps teams understand the constraints and what good automation should actually look like before committing to a larger platform.
Five HRTech thoughts you’ll leave us with before we wrap up?
HRTech is moving from systems of record to systems of execution. The opportunity now is using that data to actually get work done autonomously.
Employees do not think in departments. They think “I have a problem and need it solved.” The tools that succeed will be the ones that solve problems the way employees expect, rather than reinforcing organizational silos.
HR teams will increasingly need to operate like product teams. Understanding the goal, the end user, measuring what is happening, and continuously iterating.
AI will remove a large portion of the operational coordination that currently consumes HR teams. That frees HR up to focus on the more complex work that requires creativity and judgmet.
The biggest shift ahead is cultural. HR teams will need to rethink parts of their operating model, and how they create impact inside the organization.
Read More on Hrtech : AI-Native HRTech: Embedding Intelligence At The Core Of Workforce Strategy
[To share your insights with us, please write to psen@itechseries.com ]
Kinfolk is the AI Workforce Operations platform for modern HR teams. It combines agentic AI in Slack, HR-specific ticketing, lifecycle automation, and analytics to handle employee support and people programs end to end. By replacing fragmented tools and manual coordination, Kinfolk helps organizations scale operations, deliver more consistent employee support, and increase team capacity without adding headcount.
Jeet Mukerji is the Co-founder and CEO of Kinfolk. Previously, he led the AI team as the lead Product manager at Beamery, where he helped scale the platform from Series A to Series C and worked with enterprise customers including Amazon. He brings deep experience building and operationalizing AI products for HR.
The post HRTech Interview With Jeet Mukerji, CEO at Kinfolk appeared first on TecHR.
Comments
Post a Comment