(0:00) The goal was always to just make work more enjoyable, relationships and connections stronger. And so now in this world of AI, we’re probably one of the few AI companies that actually does not replace people. We’re actually enhancing people’s relationships. And we’re the first AI that actually makes work and people more human.
(0:33) Welcome to the Harry Handles It podcast. Today we’ve got the incredible John Betancourt who is a tech founder, former Fortune 500 executive, workforce strategist and the CEO of Humantelligence, a new AI company. Welcome to the podcast, John.
(0:50) Thanks for having me here, Harry.
(0:51) Of course. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you found yourself to be the CEO of Humantelligence?
(0:56) You know, I was a highly educated guy, Northeast 18 years, 20 years. I left the US to Latin America 10 years, Europe for 10 years and then came back to the US. I worked at large corporations, Proctor and Gamble, Reebok, Puma, worked at a similar type company in France called Decathlon. Then I had a second career for 15 years as a head hunter. So what they call an executive search consultant with the two blue chip firms. One called Heidrick & Struggles, one called Korn Ferry. They’re like the McKinsey or Goldman Sachs for recruiting executives. And I went from large corporate because I couldn’t stand, you know, how bad managers made one’s life miserable. And I always thought there should be a better way of making managers better. And then I went into headhunting where I found executives through interviews and using personality tests. So between those two careers of large corporate companies with bad management and then using psychometrics for recruiting, I always had this dream of using psychology at scale with technology to help everyone.
(1:55) And so 10 years ago, I launched Humantelligence using psychology. So a personality test embedded within workflows. So within Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Slack, Zoom, you name it, where you can get insights about people while you work and where you work at any time. Such questions like, how do I work better with Harry? Why are we having conflict? And so the goal was always to just make work more enjoyable, relationships and connections stronger. And so now in this world of AI, we’re probably one of the few AI companies that actually does not replace people. We’re actually enhancing people’s relationships. And we’re the first AI that actually makes work and people more human, which is kind of a flipping on its head, this fear everybody has. So that’s kind of how I got into it. And it’s been a long 10 years and it took a while for AI and technology and integrations to get to the point where it is now seamless and fun and a great tool to use.
(2:50) So tell me a little bit more about Humantelligence. I know at our firm we’ve used some of the personality test for hiring assessment better training for our team. The Colbe, the prints. Is that similar to the Humantelligence tool or or is it just different way of delivering that kind of information to the people?
(3:06) Very different but let me tell you an analogy have you ever used Grammarly?
(3:10) Yes.
(3:10) So the analogy is how is using a dictionary on your desk different than using Grammarly?
(3:16) Yeah.
(3:17) The dictionary on your desk you never use. Grammarly is what you’re using 10 times a day. We have the exact same thing. All the psychometric tests you just mentioned, Predictive Index, Colby, Hogan, Linger, people take them, they do the workshop, you spend $30,000 for the team to get to know each other and then it goes into a folder and you never look it again. That’s analogous to the dictionary or the thesaurus. We did what Grammarly did. We basically take those results, upload them into a system, Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Zoom, Google Workplace. And now like Grammarly all that information is flowing. So you can ask any question any time. So we get usage of about 25 to 30 per month. So we’re looking at 300 uses a year. 300 times the system what we call Ask Aura. This kind of agentic robot woman. Ask Aura can answer any question like a personal coach. So it’s actually the first AI coach that knows you, knows your team, knows your firm and can or the whole organization and can answer questions around the psychology. Just like in the old model of psychometric personality test, you would only get that in the workshop in person for $30,000 for two hours and then never again. Ours is any moment all day long, 24/7 for tens of thousands of people up and running in 10 minutes. No software integration needed.
(4:36) I love that because we we found that to be a challenge. Like we do these tests, we found some value in it, there’s some benefit, there’s a big kumbaya moment, but then how do you carry that forward and and I love that this solution patches that together.
(4:48) And what you just said, how does that how do we carry this forward? That is the number one complaint and feedback at the end of those workshops. Hey consultant, this was amazing, but how do we now use in our day-to-day? Hey. And the answer was always, well, remember to go into your folder and it doesn’t matter that the people you’re working with probably haven’t taken it because it was only for our little team of 10 and not the 4,000 employees. So, and we we give the assessment for free. I actually don’t believe there’s any value in a self-awareness tool if it’s not being used by people with others. So, I give the test for free.
(5:20) Incredible. I mean, you said it’s been a, you know, 10 year work in progress. Can you talk about some iterations of the company as it came up to being what it is today?
(5:27) You know, we started because I’d just come out of head hunting or recruiting for executives. I was looking for an assessment at first to just be me interviewing someone and filtering understanding their behaviors, their motivators, their work styles. And so most recruiters at law firms or at any company don’t really know how to measure behaviors, motivators, values, work styles, right? They’re not professional psychologists. And so I found and bought for $2 and a half million dollars the world’s most advanced scientific instrument personality test that measures behaviors, motivators, values, work styles, leadership styles, and communication styles. And so I bought it and I built a software company with an applicant tracking system so that anybody could just send a link to a candidate or group of candidates already integrated into UKG workday success factors or issimo whatever the ATS is. So you just send it out through your existing system and you could see the profile and compare it to the hiring manager or compare it to the team or compare it to all the high performers. So it was a bold it was a home run, right? Like give it to all your high performing uh uh junior law uh firm uh workers, right? The ones who come right out of business law school. Give it to your high performing ones and it’ll tell you what are the characteristics of 28 things. What are the four things that explain high performance at that law firm for instance that indicate success? Are they all decisive? Are they all deliberate? Are they all conceptual or detail oriented? And then you can use it to hire and it’ll give you a score how good a fit they are for the role or the team. We did that for three and a half, four years, crushed it. Got up to like two half million dollars. We were top startup in Miami. But then COVID came. I would have loved to have been a restaurant during COVID because a restaurant at least there was no loss for demand for food, right? People still ate. Actually, I think a lot of people ate more. Um but at least my 20 pounds actually included.
(7:16) Um Yeah. Right. The problem with restaurants was well the demand didn’t go down. We just can’t serve in our restaurant. We got to get the food to that to that customer. That that was a real challenge. But with recruiting software, nobody was hiring. I mean, so our demand went to zero. Within 3 months, our two and a half million in ARR went to zero. So I fired everybody but two developers. So that was the first four years of the company. So you know, fast growth and then nothing. And then we tinkered around. We pivoted like how do we get the psychometric tool for existing employees? And so we we got it into Zoom and Microsoft Teams virtual so that you could do it during meetings and we sold it as a collaboration platform and it was awesome. Like you could you could write an email, push the button, it rewrote your email for you in in Outlook or Gmail the way your recipient wants to read the information unlike Grammarly which can’t do that. Grammarly can pick the tone you want but if you don’t know the person you’re writing to that doesn’t matter if you picked your own tone. You want to you want it to be ruining the tone for your audience. And we could do that. Grammarly you could get insights around a meeting like right now in this meeting you could click the button it’ll tell you on Zoom or Microsoft teams the dynamic of the team and so better norming forming storming for a cross functional or remote teams working together now that all came to not because this sounds silly we had a great collaboration platform you would think collaboration’s important well just because people were talking about how hard it was to collaborate no company in the world has a chief collaboration officer where does that person sit how do you sell a collaboration tool to a company where there’s no one with the mandate to solve collaboration other than it during COVID which was oh let’s get people connected but connected is not collaboration so it didn’t care how well people collaborated they just want to make sure everybody could get on a call together and so we found ourselves kind of like pushing water up a mountain because nobody cared at these companies about collaboration and so we did two and a half years of kind of that didn’t work and then we saw chatt come out it two years ago and that was the moment I thought you know mic drop type moment. every every piece of content in the world will be will be consumed not through like a a click and read click and read click and read like you do on Google search engine but a let me just ask a bot let me just ask a coach let me just so if you noticed every company out there now has ask you know Gemini ask Amazon they don’t have their names we’re ask aura and so I was like wow why don’t we just create an ask aura kind of like a chatpt but it’s bounded and constrained by questions around collaboration teamwork leadership ship conflict and all the things that psychology can help answer. So, it was it was a long meandering path, but for the last two years, we’re really crushing it. We’re growing again, and it’s really been fun.
(9:56) That’s awesome. I mean, recruiting is a big problem for for almost any business that’s scaling or growing at all. What did you bring from the private headhunting space into Humantelligence that you found benefited from your experience in that?
(10:06) Well, I think when in our first iteration of the product, I kind of just knew the way recruiters think and so it really helped with every little feature and function. So, even pricing, right? Like I remember that most most applicant tracking software was was priced per candidate and same with assessment tools were priced like how many assessments were taken. But then companies don’t want to pay for a thousand assessments if they’re only hiring one person because at the end of the day other 999 assessments they paid for that really used. So we changed the pricing more to like the executive search model like hey what value is there for us to find you the right person? let’s just put a fixed value to that and we’ll give you the assessment unlimited version right so that was one thing um that we did on pricing being able to do comparisons not only with the manager but with the team with high performers those are things that I got and I learned from my my head hunting uh role um there are probably a lot more little details but after you know that was five years ago when we were doing the recruiting tool.
(11:05) and so tell me a little bit about your background before all this you tell me about the Facebook before the Facebook and how that came to be.
(11:12) interesting Think funny you found that uh that reference. Yeah. So I used to I used to I used to love meeting people like my my vibration is curiosity and connector. Those are the two things that kind of define my energy and uh and so my father was a professor in France at a business school called INSEAD. And every summer from the age of three or two we would go to France with all these other kids from all over the world. And you know I’m 55 56 though you know back when I was in high school there was no internet. I mean, I didn’t get internet till I was like 25, maybe 28 years old. And so, I used to write postcards to all these kids I met. And we’re talking not a few. By the time I was 10, I was writing a 100 postcards a week. By the time I was 18, I was writing like 300 postcards a week. And so, when the internet came right after college at 22, I could then scale even more. And I also had more money. I could travel more. I worked all over the world. So, I was meeting people every three years all the time. I I practically didn’t have time for dating. Um and so I they called me the Facebook before before Facebook because you know I knew more people than anybody. Like Facebook had a cap at 5,000. I already knew 20,000 people when Facebook came out, right? Like same with LinkedIn. Um the joke the running joke was like Juans knows everybody with John. There’s a a one degree se one degree of separation with John. that that’s kind of the and uh and I had this whole system of staying in touch and a lot of little a lot of things that Facebook tries to do to keep you connected I was doing naturally that that’s the story behind that on uh which also kind of led to my human intelligence ask is at the end of the day we’re all about at human intelligence using psychometrics to create better connection using psychometrics to creating a a vibration between people as if they’ve been married for 5 years even though they’ve only met for five minutes.
(12:57) I love that so much because after these assessments after considering the human psychology in our own practice in my own practice in my own team. Changing the way I communicate with the different team members depending on how they receive information has been a game changer for me. So I love that this tool exists and I love how easy it sounds like it makes the facilitation of this connect connection with other team members. somebody who I may not have, you know, 15 conversations a week with, but the one time I need to speak to them every other month or every month, it becomes a memorable and elevating experience for everybody involved and, you know, things don’t get crossed and messages don’t get mixed.
(13:31) Yeah. Especially during performance review period, it’s the most delicate conversations about, hey, you’re not performing or what’s your career path, what should it be, what would be good for you, what would be good for the company. All of those moments are delicate and a tool like ours gives the script to someone like you. You Harry clearly know how to take a report of somebody else, interpret it and then change even though it’s difficult and then deliver a new message. Nine of 10 leaders can’t do like you. And so our tool allows those other nine to figure it out without naturally being able to to change their behavior.
(14:05) Yeah, I love that. And how does it show up in like your workplace flow? I know you said Teams, I know you said Slack, but does it kind of show up with suggested ways to communicate with somebody or do you have to prompt a tool to tell you?
(14:15) So prompting is a big part of how we constructed our platform. If you go to chat GPT, there’s just a big square. I don’t believe people are curious enough to know what to do with that big square. Like, you know, you give 80% of human beings on this planet 5 hours with God and they wouldn’t know what to ask.
(14:34) Good.
(14:35) It’s sad, but it’s true. So instead of having a square, we kind of guide people kind of like a coach where we say, “What do you want to do today?” And then we have different boxes like tiles on a screen or on your phone. Are you having conflict? Do you need to lead a team or manage a team or have something around team dynamics? Do you have questions around cross-cultural stuff? Uh do you have questions around uh just somebody else in the company you want to know about? So let’s then you drill into one of those. Let’s say it’s uh about somebody else about Harry, guy named Harry. Um uh do you want to know how to collaborate with Harry? Do you want to know uh how to develop Harry? Uh conflict with Harry and then let’s say collaborate collaborate. Okay. And then we have five questions. Uh how are Harry and I most different? How are we most similar? So and we still have the little bar where you can just go straight into your question if you have it. But we’re kind of coaching people, right? Like for a team team dynamics. Uh how do I lead this team? What would drain this team? How do I motivate this team? What a motivational speech for this team? uh you know who is the most uh do you want to find someone in your company and you click in and like you can do a drop down most creative person in the company most structured person most process-oriented trying to create a team with the the the description here so we’re kind of pulling along the user with questions that they might not have come up with on their own.
(15:52) Yeah, that’s really cool. Does does it depend on the input from team members? Team members all have to take an assessment built into the tool.
(15:59) Yes, we do not scrape and crawl people’s emails. That’s not a it’s not ethically correct. I wouldn’t want somebody reading all my stuff and trying to get to know me and and b it’s actually not accurate. The only way you can know somebody’s psychology and what values they have and what motivates them is actually taking a personality test. Most tests have to be validated as as scientific instruments or they cannot be legally used at companies both for recruiting and for coaching. And so there’s only about 30 tools out there in the world that are actually scientifically validated. We’re one of them. uh that’s why we had to buy our way into that tool. So, so yeah, so to get the insights and to be able to answer questions about other people or a team, everyone in company has to take the assessment. Now, it’s not mandated on a Monday morning. Email goes out. Hey, welcome to human intelligence, this journey for better collaboration, leadership, team effectiveness. We’re going to use this tool. If you want voluntarily, you can take and participate. It’s a 10-minute assessment or you can even upload other assessments. So we now have the ability, we’re agnostic, we can upload anybody’s assessment, Hogan, DIS, predictive index. And we get about 93% of employees opting in voluntarily to take to take the assessment.
(17:08) And is the tool do you have a target business um size? Is it a good tool for a business of two people? Is it a good tool for 200, 2,000?
(17:17) Yeah. So leadership, collaboration, and understanding applies to every company in the world, whether it’s two people, 200, 2,000, or 20 million people. Now, the smaller the company, the more you know everyone. So, picture a law firm, 10 people that have worked together for 10 years. They’ve already figured out how to communicate with each other. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be together that long, right? It’s like a married couple after 20 years. All these tools wouldn’t matter because after 20 years, you figured out how to change your approach and you know, when you have something really important, I got to approach my wife or my spouse this way, right? However, because most 10 person companies haven’t worked 10 years together and they have some new people coming on, our tool still makes sense. However, it’s not going to get used more than maybe three to four times a month. Okay, a large company with 20,000 employees, which is now complexity. You’re working cross functionally. You’re on seven different teams. You don’t see these people. There’s new employees every month. You’re working with people in different countries. there you’re getting about 30 uses a month because every day there’s someone you’re work writing to working with on a call with that you have no idea who they are and so there’s just more usage at the bigger companies smaller companies there’s a little less usage but it’s just as valuable to have obviously we we make money on the bigger companies so we’re focused on selling this kind of product to uh 500 or more employees but for less than 500 we give a really good one one price for everybody which isn’t too much and people can uh have fun with it.
(18:44) Awesome. And does it still tie into the recruiting aspect at all to pre to help like provide assessments of is this new person going to fit in or how would this new person fit into this specific team?
(18:53) You can use it for that. We also have this this askaura agent in our recruiting tool. So we now have two modules as the AI coach and we have the talent fit for recruiting our old product that’s still there with with Ascora built in.
(19:08) Got it. Cool. Have you found that companies will spend a lot of money recruiting people, but they don’t spend as much time or effort in trying to retain or or keep or coach these teams into more success?
(19:20) I think they spend equal amount of time and money, but on the wrong things, right? So, you know, every day, every month for the last seven years, I’ve been reading about engagement surveys. We want to understand our employees and why they’re engaged, why they’re not, why they’re not feeling connected. you know, people are quitting and and and you know, they’re spending millions of dollars on these engagement surveys which tell people if they’re happy or not. Like at the end of the day, a tool like askaura solves all engagement. It’ll tell you the two biggest the two biggest things with engagement are I I quit my boss. I can’t stand them, right? And they don’t and that’s usually friction. I don’t believe that everybody’s out there so mean and horrible. I just think people have different styles and it feels like the person hates you when they have, you know, a different style. If one person’s decisive and the other person’s deliberate and the boss is decisive, they’ll get so frustrated by the deliberate subordinate. Not only are they decisive boss, but they’re also conceptual. Now you have a deliberate subordinate who’s also detail-oriented. So they’re taking forever and they’re giving too much information. I mean, this is like it’s going to blow up. And neither one is right or wrong and good or bad, but the feeling that both will have is I hate that person. They don’t know what the hell they’re doing. Okay, our tool will get rid of that. Art tool explained to both people that hey neither one of you is right. You both have to meet in the middle, right? Because a leader of five people has to come to the middle with five different profiles. It’s hard to be a manager because you have to become schizophrenic and have different personalities for everyone. But unless you have a tool like ours, it’s very difficult to do unless you know there’s like 10% of people that can naturally do that. And the other thing, so our tool helps with that reason people quit and who are not engaged. And the other reason our tool helps with engagement is what projects you’re working on. Our tool you can literally say the company has these five projects A B CDE E and you describe it which one would be best for Harry to keep to keep him most fulfilled and engaged. Today there’s no tool or boss in the world that would know the answer. Even Harry wouldn’t know that answer because you don’t know all the intricacies of each type of project and how that will tap into your motivations, your values, your work styles. Aura in two seconds you could plop that in and ask Aura and it’ll tell you oh give Harry project three a cross functional project that’s strategic and here’s why. Right? So we solve engagement but a lot of money is being spent on that. So I think money and time is being spent on these things but just they’re wrongly placed. Another study Gartner showed that only 40% of managers so picture big company all those mid-level managers 40% I’m I’m sorry 45% never get training on leadership on how to lead a team or manage a team. I believe that the problem is they’re spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for the 5%. They’re not spending on a tool like ours one-tenth of that for the whole company. Our tool can develop all managers, all levels for a fraction of the price. It’s only a couple dollars per person per month.
(22:03) Yeah. And just to give people that little bit of human intelligence to help make better communication decisions or make better decisions overall with their team. I feel like there’s great value in that. Tell our viewer view viewers, John, how they can find out more information about you, more information about the company and and stay connected.
(22:17) Yeah, they can find me on John at LinkedIn at John Betancourt. They can go to my email and write to john.betttonortintelligence.com and they can visit our website at www.askora. That’s a.ai.
(22:36) Awesome. Well, thank you so much for the conversation today, John, and I look forward to speaking to you again.
(22:40) Thank you, Harry.
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