Revolutionising Workforce Management: BetterPlace’s Vision for Digital Transformation and Skilling in India
In an exclusive interview with Express Computer, Ved Antani, Chief Product and Technology Officer at BetterPlace, discusses the company’s role in the digital transformation of workforce management. Antani elaborates on BetterPlace’s goBetter initiative, a full-stack horizontal platform that aims to address challenges faced by the frontline workforce in adopting technological solutions. The interview explores the integration with ONEST to bridge information gaps in skilling, projected outreach to frontline workers, and the impact on India’s labour productivity. Antani also shares insights into AI integration, democratising skilling, and success stories illustrating BetterPlace’s innovative approaches to workforce management. The conversation concludes with a glimpse into BetterPlace’s future strategies, technological innovations in background verification, and adaptation to the evolving nature of remote work.
In a rapidly evolving work landscape, how does BetterPlace envision and contribute to the digital transformation of workforce management, ensuring efficiency and compliance?
Despite great strides in digitization across sectors in India, the frontline workforce segment has largely been slow to adopt technological solutions. This has led to two problems: they are either bogged down by manual processes, leading to cost and time inefficiencies, or they have multiple digital platforms to optimise different aspects of workforce management, where managing different solutions becomes a challenge. Due to this, enterprises are unable to adapt to the evolving work landscape.
In this ecosystem, BetterPlace and its unified tech stack, goBetter, were created to become a full-stack horizontal platform with a single philosophy: enable smart automation across the frontline workforce management value chain. We have done this in two ways: Firstly, we have created a horizontal platform with solutions for all workforce needs, from hiring and vendor management to skilling and productivity management. Moreover, because of our platform infrastructure, whenever there is a change in the nature of work, a new solution can easily be integrated into the platform. Secondly, we have invested heavily in GenAI to not only automate manual processes like screening of CVs, assessing candidates, etc., but we are also using it to generate content for skilling, on-field assistance for frontline workers, automated productivity improvement modules, etc.
This has helped enterprises cut down on more than 40% of their operational costs and has also made them dynamic enough to adapt to the changing nature of working with us.
Can you elaborate on BetterPlace’s integration with ONEST, and what was the rationale behind this collaboration? How does it address the existing information asymmetries in skilling the frontline workforce?
Eight years into this industry, we realised that the crux of the workforce problem in India and Southeast Asia was not the demand-supply gap but was more about the skill-demand gap. Hence, to unlock the true potential of our workforce, we need to skill them at scale. As a tech-first company, we saw the promise in digital public infrastructures like ONEST because of their capabilities to enhance access and reduce information asymmetries. ONEST has a pool of organisations that have signed up with them to create and alert individuals about scholarships and upskilling courses. GoBetter, on the other hand, has a large pool of employees who are in need of upskilling courses and scholarships. Through this integration, all the courses and scholarships available on ONEST can be accessed by frontline workers through the BetterPlace app. Our aim is to first take this to the kids of frontline workers and housewives in order to upskill them and provide them with a complete portfolio of scholarships, and then integrate it with our GenAI models to curate a mix of skilling courses for frontline workers based on their performance on the job. This will not only help frontline workers grow vertically but also substantially increase their earning potential.
By the end of the year, what is the projected number of frontline workers that BetterPlace aims to reach out to through this integration? How does this initiative contribute to closing the skill-demand gap in India?
By the end of 2024, we aim to upskill and educate more than a million individuals, including frontline workers and their children. With this platform collaboration, we are optimistic about producing and providing skilled and up-skilled resources, in contrast to the existing pool of semi-skilled and underskilled resources, to increase workforce productivity. Upskilling will not only enable the workers to become ready for the various types of gig opportunities but will also increase their earnings potential, thereby solving the skill demand gap in India.
The labour productivity rate in India is reported to be relatively low compared to other developing countries. In what ways does BetterPlace envision contributing to an improvement in India’s labour productivity, and how can this positively impact both the workforce and the larger economy?
India’s low labour productivity is largely a factor of three things. Firstly, almost 50% of our workforce is engaged in agriculture, which has been a low-productivity industry for a very long time. Secondly, among the non-agricultural workers, 83% work in the informal sector, which means that they neither get a guaranteed minimum wage nor do they get any social benefits. This has led to a stagnation of incomes for this section of the workforce, which has contributed to higher attrition rates and lower productivity. Lastly, even in the formal workforce segment, there is a large skill demand gap, because of which enterprises have to spend a lot of money and time to skill these workers.
While the first challenge is being solved by the government at large through schemes like PLI, BetterPlace is playing a role in the second and third challenges. We are solving the informality problem by empowering enterprises to hire more. With a unified stack like GoBetter, enterprises are able to save up to 70% of their operational costs, which they can invest back into their business to expand, which would lead to higher employment and formalisation. We are solving the skill-demand gap in two ways. Firstly, we are democratising skilling courses through partnerships with organisations like ONEST. Secondly, through generative AI, we are automating the assessment of worker productivity and auto-generating skill content to help them improve those specific skills, leading to a more holistic and sustainable spike in productivity.
Given the significant skill-demand gap in India’s frontline workforce, how does BetterPlace’s goBetter initiative address the challenge of information asymmetry in skilling?
goBetter’s tech stack is bridging the skill-demand gap by focusing on democratisation and scalability. We are able to do this because of our platform infrastructure. Frontline workers who are looking for work generally do not know what sort of work is available and what sort of skills are needed to get that work. We are trying to solve this by democratising skilling courses in our collaboration with ONEST by bringing industry-level skills to frontline workers so that they can land a formal job. Enterprises, on the other hand, are now forced to hire semi-skilled workers and invest in training them to improve their productivity. The problem with this approach is that it is expensive, time-consuming, and does not take into account the different aptitude levels of frontline workers. goBetter, through its platform and GenAI capabilities, solves this problem as well. With goBetter, enterprises can distribute skilling modules to a large number of workers across geographies and assess them remotely. Moreover, with our GenAI models, these skilling courses can be distributed in multiple different languages, and based on the assessment, additional learning resources can also be provided to frontline workers. This leads to a much better skill outcome than just achieving skill outputs.
The goBetter initiative focuses on providing vocational training to the frontline workforce. Could you share some success stories or examples of individuals or communities that have benefited from this programme, highlighting the tangible impact on their employability and skill development?
Upskilling frontline workers is a global initiative most modern enterprises are actively participating in. While the goBetter learning platform allows learning solutions across industries, we see the maximum engagement from frontline workers when the learning content is available in bite-sized format and in local language. We see transformational stories across industries where frontline workers have moved to higher-paying jobs (from delivery person to shift supervisor within the same company). We have seen frontline workers contribute back to the community via the same channels. By the end of 2024, we aim to upskill and educate more than a million individuals, including frontline workers and their children.
In designing content for frontline workers, how does BetterPlace envision leveraging Gen AI, open networks, and machine learning? What role do these technologies play in tailoring skilling solutions to the diverse needs of the workforce and eventually enterprises?
Every single industry globally is going through an AI revolution. The ones who are ahead of the curve in adoption will inevitably have a competitive advantage; the ones who don’t will probably find it difficult to survive in a tech-savvy market. BetterPlace has always been at the forefront of enabling digital adoption and transformation for the frontline workforce segment. In order to address the dynamic and ever-evolving needs of our client enterprises and the workforce, at goBetter, we are focused on three major pillars: accessibility, scale, and analytics. Most workforce SaaS platforms are not built to manage workforces at scale. They are designed for white-collar workers who have some digital skills to help them navigate through the software. However, when it comes to frontline workers, these softwares become complex to use and also cumbersome when it comes to managing a large number of workers. With AI, we aim to solve this by introducing intuitive no-code features into our software, which would help enterprises add the relevant modules easily and deploy them to a large workforce seamlessly. Moreover, these modules will also be very intuitive for the blue-collar workers themselves to use. Second, we are using AI to achieve scale. Through generative AI, we will introduce modules like automated skilling, automated hiring and onboarding, etc. Generative AI will help enterprises automatically create training modules, automatically translate them into regional languages, and deploy them to the phones of their workforce. Moreover, generative AI will also help in the screening and onboarding of employees. Currently, recruiters are able to screen up to 50 workers in a day. With AI, each HR manager will be able to screen more than 2000 workers, automatically shortlist them, send them basic tests whose assessments will be done automatically, and through chatbots, automatically onboard the workers by doing their documentation. This will help reduce the human touchpoint for onboarding workers by 80%. Lastly, we are bringing AI to bring in analytics for HR managers. HR managers can assess the productivity, attendance, skill levels, etc. of employees, and the AI will automatically recommend interventions they must take. In total, through AI, we would aim to formalise more than 50% of the workforce in APAC in the GCC by 2025.
Looking ahead, how does BetterPlace plan to evolve its strategies and capitalise on the integration with ONEST? Are there specific areas or industries where this collaboration will have a more profound impact? Could you share any success stories or tangible impacts that BetterPlace has witnessed so far through its initiatives in democratising skilling? How are frontline workers responding to the innovative approaches facilitated by BetterPlace and ONEST?
At the current stage, the partnership between goBetter and ONEST focuses on providing scholarships to the children of frontline workers and some skilling courses for frontline workers themselves. In the future, our investments in ONEST will increase. We will soon be integrating our AI modules into the ONEST platform to pull skilling courses from the platform and distribute them to the workers who demand these skills. We will also motivate our enterprise customers to onboard themselves on ONEST to create skilling courses that can be made available to a larger cohort of workers, helping them tap into a larger pool of pre-skilled workers. While industries like e-commerce, logistics, and mobility are already enjoying the impact of this partnership due to their higher digital adoption capabilities, we aim to expand the developments to other sectors as well. Because of our robust tech stack and AI capabilities, we have been able to create more and more customised upskilling courses for frontline workers, which led to sign-ups for upskilling courses growing by a whopping 194% between FY22 and FY23.
With the rise of technology, background verification processes have undergone significant changes. Could you share insights into the technological innovations that BetterPlace employs to enhance the accuracy, speed, and reliability of background checks?
The fact that BetterPlace started as a background verification platform and has served multiple enterprises across industries has made our data repository extremely robust. With our experience and industry-agnostic tech stack, all on a single horizontal platform, we have been able to not just gather the basic KYC data from vendors but also analyse performance and work history data about workers. This data gives us a meticulous insight into the work capability of a specific worker across multiple industries and job roles, reflecting productivity measures and how suitable they are for a particular job profile. Now, with the help of Gen AI, we have been able to transform our background verification stack into a proactive background verification stack, wherein AI can help screen specific workers for specific tasks and ascertain which skills they lack while also presenting them with the right courses to upskill themselves and be job-ready.
The future of work is becoming more dynamic and remote. How is BetterPlace adapting its solutions to cater to the changing nature of work?
We have always been foreseeing the variabilization and hyperlocalization trend among the frontline workforce since the pandemic, and now it has become the norm. Enterprises are now having to manage workers spread across geographies, sometimes managing workers whom they have never even seen. This has brought in tremendous costs for HR teams. However, BetterPlace’s platform infrastructure was designed exactly to handle such a scale. This infrastructure helps HR teams manage their vendors, payroll, performance management, attendance, etc. all on a single platform. Moreover, with all the workers on this platform, enterprises are also able to distribute benefits like insurance, credit, and skilling courses with ease using the platform.
