Ares Intelligence: The Startup Helping Companies Identify Where AI Can Deliver Business Value
How Ares Intelligence Helps Companies Identify AI Opportunities Across Their Workforce?
As businesses across industries look to adopt artificial intelligence, deciding where to begin remains a challenge. While companies are investing in AI tools and automation, identifying the processes that can benefit most from these technologies requires a clear understanding of how their organisations operate. London-based startup Ares Intelligence is addressing this gap by using AI to understand employee workflows and identify opportunities for automation.
Founded in 2026 by Matt Falconer and Alfie Ranstead, Ares Intelligence has developed a platform that conducts AI-powered interviews with employees across an organisation. The objective is to understand how work gets done, identify operational inefficiencies and provide leadership teams with evidence-based recommendations on where AI and automation could deliver business value.
The platform follows a four-stage process. It begins with a training session that introduces employees to relevant tools and technologies, helping them understand the possibilities of AI in their respective roles. This is followed by individual voice-based conversations with an AI interviewer. During these interviews, employees discuss their daily responsibilities, the tools they use, repetitive tasks and the challenges they encounter in their work.
Ares then analyses the conversations and combines the findings to identify recurring problems across departments. These could include manual processes, repetitive administrative work, inefficient handovers between teams, disconnected systems and existing use of AI tools. The information is converted into prioritised recommendations, with suggested tools, workflow changes and practical improvements linked to the problems employees have identified.
The final stage focuses on implementation, where recommendations are developed into tools and workflows for employees. According to the company, the process is designed to ensure that proposed changes address actual operational requirements rather than relying solely on management assumptions.
Ares Intelligence positions its platform as an organisational intelligence solution for businesses, private equity firms and leadership teams looking to identify opportunities for operational improvement. Its approach is based on gathering information from employees across different functions and levels, rather than depending exclusively on interviews with senior management.
The company has already published customer examples highlighting its platform’s applications. At Tremonia, a Mercedes-Benz spin-out backed by private equity firm RESVION, Ares identified more than 30 spreadsheets performing tasks that the company’s enterprise resource planning system should handle. The company also reported identifying more than 400 hours of recoverable work per month. At Spectrum Control, Ares interviewed employees across the UK business to identify areas where AI and automation could create value. Another customer, PR agency Words+Pixels, reported approximately £57,000 in annual recoverable capacity from manual work identified through the process.
The startup was founded by Matt Falconer, its chief executive, and Alfie Ranstead, its chief technology officer. Both previously co-founded Instruct, an automation business. Their experience with Instruct exposed a recurring problem among businesses interested in automation: organisations wanted to automate their operations but lacked a reliable way to identify where to start.
Ares Intelligence also highlights data protection and employee confidentiality as part of its platform. The company says its product is GDPR-compliant and SOC 2-compliant. It offers controls to mask employee names, redact voices and remove role-related metadata from reports shared with leadership. Customers can also choose to run the platform on their own cloud infrastructure or use Ares’ infrastructure in the EU or US.
In October 2026, Ares Intelligence raised €2.9 million in funding from venture capital firms Creandum and Lakestar, with participation from angel investors connected to Google DeepMind. The company said the funding would support its expansion and help bring its workforce intelligence platform to more businesses.
As organisations continue to explore enterprise AI adoption, Ares Intelligence is focusing on an important early step: understanding how employees work and identifying the operational problems that technology can address.