Seattle-based startup Ethosphere, a voice-enabled artificial intelligence platform for retail operations, said today it raised $2.5 million in pre-seed funding to bring the power of large language models to brick and mortar store floors to help sales associates deliver exceptional in-person service.

Point72 Ventures led the round, with participation from AI2 Incubator, Carya Ventures, Pack VC, Hike Ventures and J4 Ventures.

Founded in 2024, the company has built a platform that helps retailers that use data from front-line interactions with customers to generate coaching insights for associates. It comes in the form of guidance through the use of large language models and voice AI.

“AI is bringing change to every industry, and retail is no exception, but there is a significant gap in how the technology can be applied in a useful, human-focused manner,” said Evan Smith, cofounder and chief executive of Ethosphere.

Smith stated that the company takes a human-centric approach to improve the purchasing experience for customers, as this positively affects retailers’ bottom lines. When customers have a more enjoyable experience in-store due to effective salespeople, they are more likely to return or spend more at that establishment.

The same is true for employee morale. Service workers can often feel unseen by management for their accomplishments and hard work. Much of the modern retail landscape has become driven by outcomes that can be tracked and put in a ledger rather than the day-to-day experiences and context of work on the sales floor. This can become a black spiral for frontline workers who are guided to chase results instead of feeling empowered to engage with customers.

The company’s platform uses wearable microphones to record interactions between customers and associates. These recordings are processed using a set of large language models that transcribe the audio to gain insights into how salespeople are learning and developing their customer-facing skills on the job. The platform then offers specific, individualized feedback and coaching to help them improve their performance on the sales floor.

The platform’s guidance consists of praise, data insights and suggestions for improvement.

Ethosphere said the messaging provided can be tailored to the specific brand voice of the business, including adhering to jargon and company culture.

Management has access to a dashboard that allows them to see both the areas where their team excels and the challenges they need to address. The platform also provides recommendations on next steps to help managers determine the best way to support associates in their work. This includes assisting them by reducing bias in how they view their team, celebrating high-performers and addressing team building.

“In an increasingly busy landscape flooded with theoretical AI, Ethosphere stood out to us with a practical, powerful application that we believe has the potential to directly impact the sales and customer experience,” said Sri Chandrasekar, managing partner at Point72 Ventures.

The company said it would use the funds to scale up program pilots with major retailers to assist them with enhancing support for frontline employees.

Image: Pixabay

Last week in Blackburn Center, Howard University welcomed middle school, high school, and college students to explore the rapidly expanding world of robotics over the course of its second Robotics and AI Outreach Event. Teams of high school students showcased robots they built, while representatives from partnering Amazon Fulfillment Technologies, FIRST Robotics, the U.S. Navy and U.S. Army Research Laboratories, and Viriginia Tech gave presentations on their latest technologies, as well as ways to get involved in high-tech research. 

Across Thursday and Friday, Howard students and middle and high schoolers from across the DMV region heard from university researchers creating stories with generative AI and learned how they can get involved in STEM outreach from the Howard University Robotics Organization (HURO) and FIRST Robotics. They also viewed demonstrations of military unmanned ground vehicles and the Amazon Astro household robot. The biggest draw, however, was the robotics showcase in the East Ballroom. 

Over both days, middle and high school teams from across the DMV presented their robots as part of the FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) and FIRST Robotics Competition, during which they were tasked with designing a robot within  six weeks. The program is intensive and gives students a taste of a real-world engineering career, as the students not only design and build their entries, but also engage in outreach events and raise their own funding each year.

“It’s incredible,” said Shelley Stoddard, vice president of FIRST Chesapeake. “I liken our teams to entrepreneurial startups. Each year they need to think about who they’re recruiting, how they’re recruiting; what they’re going to do for fundraising. If they want to have a brand, they create that, they manage that. We are highly encouraging of outreach because we don’t want it to be insular to just their schools or their classrooms.” 

Reaching the Next Generation of Engineers

This entrepreneurial spirit carries across the teams, such as the Ashburn, Virginia-based BeaverBots, who showed up in matching professional attire to stand out to potential recruits and investors as they presented three separate robots they’ve designed over the years — the Stubby V2, Dam Driver V1, and DemoBot — all built for lifting objects. Beyond already being skilled engineers and coders in their own right, the team has a heavy focus on getting younger children into robotics, even organizing their own events.

“One of the biggest things about our outreach is showing up to scrimmages and showing people we actually care about robotics and want to help kids join robotics,” said team member and high school junior Savni (last name withheld). “So, for example we’ve started a team in California, we’ve mentored [in] First Lego League, and we’ve hosted multiple scrimmages with FTC teams.”

“We also did a presentation in our local Troop 58 in Ashburn, where we showed our robot and told kids how they can get involved with FIRST,” added team vice-captain Aryan. “Along with that, a major part of our fundraising is sponsorship and matching grants.  We’ve received matching grants from CVS, FabWorks, and ICF.”

This desire to pay it forward and get more people involved in engineering wasn’t limited to the teams. Members of the student-run HURO were also present, putting on a drone demo and giving lectures advocating for more young Black intellectuals to get into science and engineering. 

“Right now, we’re doing a demo of one of our drones from the drone academy,” explained senior electrical engineering major David Toler II. “It’s a program we’ve put on since 2024 as a way to enrich the community around us and educate the Black community in STEM. We not only provide free drones to high schools, but we also work hands-on with them in very one-on-one mentor styles to give them knowledge to build on themselves and understand exactly how it works, why it works, and what components are necessary.” 

Building A Strong Support Network

HURO has been involved with the event from the beginning. Event organizer and Howard professor Harry Keeling, Ph.D., credits the drone program for helping the university’s AI and robotics outreach take flight. 

“It started with the drone academy, then that expanded through Dr. Todd Shurn’s work through the Sloan Foundation in the area of gaming,” explained Keeling. “Then gaming brought us to AI, and we got more money from Amazon and finally said ‘we need to do more outreach.’” 

Since 2024, Keeling has been working to bring more young people into engineering and AI research, relying on HURO, other local universities and high schools, industry partners like Amazon, and the Department of Defense, to build a strong network dedicated to local STEM outreach. Like with FIRST Robotics, a large part of his motivation with these growing partnerships is to prepare students for successful  jobs in the industry.

“We tell our students that in this field, networking is how you accomplish career growth,” he said. “None of us knows everything about what we do, but we can have a network where we can reach out to people who know more than we do. And the stronger our network is, the more we are able to solve problems in our own personal and professional lives.” 

At next year’s event, Keeling plans to step back and allow HURO to take over  more of the organizing and outreach, further bringing the next generation into leadership positions within the field. Meanwhile, he is working with other faculty members across the university to bring AI to the curriculum, further demystifying the technology and ensuring Howard students are prepared for the future. 

For Keeling, outreach events like this are vital to ensuring that young people feel confident in entering robotics, rather than intimidated. 

“One thing I realized is young people gravitate to what they see,” he said. “If they can’t see it, they can’t conceive it. These high schoolers[and] middle schoolers are getting a chance to rub elbows with a lot of professionals [and] understand what a roboticist ultimately might be doing in life.” 

He hopes that his work eventually makes children see a future in tech as just as possible as any other field they see on TV. 

“I was talking with my daughters, and I asked them at dinner ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’” Keeling said. “And my youngest one said astronauts, and an artist, and a cook. Now hopefully one day, one of those 275 students that were listening to my presentation will answer the question with ‘I want to be an AI expert. I want to be a roboticist.’ Because they’ve come here, they’ve seen and heard what they can do.”

Many people worry that AI is going to take their job. But a recent survey conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that rather than laying off workers, many AI-adopting firms are retraining their workforces to use the new technology. Yet there’s little research into whether existing job-training programs are helping workers successfully adapt to an evolving labor market.

A new working paper starts to fill that gap. A team of researchers, including doctoral candidate Karen Ni of the Harvard Kennedy School, analyzed worker outcomes after they participated in job-training programs through the U.S. government’s Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act. Researchers looked at administrative earnings records spanning the quarters before and after workers completed training. Then they analyzed workers’ earning when transitioning from or into an occupation that was highly “AI-exposed” — a term that refers to the extent of tasks that have the potential to be automated, both in the traditional computerization sense and through generative AI technology.

Across the board, the training programs demonstrated a positive impact, with displaced workers seeing increased earnings after entering a new occupation. Still, those earnings were less for someone who targeted a high AI-exposed occupation than someone who targeted a low AI-exposed occupation.

In this edited conversation, Ni explains the role that job-training programs play as AI use is transforming the labor market.

With all the discussion around job displacement and AI, what led you to focus on retraining in particular?

When thinking about the disruptions that a new large-scale technology might have for the labor market, it’s important to understand whether it’s possible for us to help workers who might be displaced by these technologies to transition into other work. So we homed in on, OK, we know that some of these workers are being displaced. Now, what can job training services do for them? Can they improve their job prospects? Can they help them move up in terms of earnings? Is it possible to retrain some of these workers for highly AI-exposed roles?

We wanted to help document the transition and adaptability for these displaced workers, especially those who are lower income. Because then we can think about how we can support these workers, whether it be better investing in these kinds of workforce-development programs or training programs, or adapting those programs to the evolving labor market landscape.

What can we learn by looking at data from government workforce development programs?

One of the big advantages of using these trainees is that it’s nationwide, and so it’s nationally representative. That allows us to take a broad look at trainees across the entire country and capture a fair bit of heterogeneity in terms of their occupations and backgrounds. For the large part, our sample captures displaced workers who tend to be lower income, making an average of $40,000 a year. Some are making big transitions from one occupation to a completely different one. We also see a fair number of people who end up going into the same types of jobs that they had before. We think those workers are likely trying to develop new skills or credentials that might be helpful to enter back into a similar occupation. Some of these people might be displaced from their occupation because of AI. But the job displacement in this sample could be for any reason, like a regional office shutting down.

Can you provide some examples of highAI-exposed careers versus low AI-exposed careers?

AI exposure refers to the extent of tasks within an occupation that could potentially be completed by a machine or a large language model. Among our sample of job trainees, some of the most common high AI-exposed occupations were customer service representatives, cashiers, office clerks. On the other end of the spectrum, the lowest AI-exposed workers tended to be manual laborers, such as movers, industrial truck drivers, or packagers.

AI retrainability by occupation

What were your main findings?