Wrksense is an AI agent that helps recruiters in large organisations cut weeks from the hiring process. The company’s focus is international, and since the assistant went fully live five months ago, its co-founder, Andrew Connolly, has been constantly on the road pitching to potential clients and gaining customers in Ireland, the UK, Canada, Costa Rica and the Philippines.

Connolly’s background is in recruitment, and he spent more than a decade working with global recruitment firm Morgan McKinley, most recently as managing director of its Canadian office.

His co-founder is deep-tech expert Ruaidhrí McDonnell, who designed and built the agent. The founders began developing their idea in 2023 before progressing to a soft launch in December last year.

“Coming out of Covid, we both felt that hiring had become less personal and much more transactional and disjointed,” Connolly says. “Then at Christmas 2022, we were having a catch-up and started talking about generative AI and ChatGPT. We both felt this was something really different – not a technology, but a tool we could actually use – and we went from there.

“Hiring is often slowed down by poor communication and a lot of admin. Wrksense removes these barriers, leaving recruiters and hiring managers free to focus on making the right hiring decisions,” Connolly adds. “Our agent works like an experienced hiring professional. It can manage assessments, suitability checks, scheduling and communication, leaving the interview managers free to gather key role details and engage candidates to assess motivation and fit.”

The Wrksense agent integrates with customers’ existing HR platforms and can take instructions like a human team member. This means that if a manager has specific hiring criteria, the agent learns what’s required for a particular role and accommodates it.

“One of our USPs is that it doesn’t take months to set up our system. We come with our knowledge piece and add it to the organisation’s knowledge piece, and from first engagement to seeing results can be as quick as four to six weeks,” Connolly says. “We are already fully integrated with Workday [which provides HR enterprise resource planning software], which was a big win for us and we’re in the process of becoming so with SAP.”

Wrksense is aimed at medium- to large-sized organisations hiring 200+ new people a year.

“Existing tools automate isolated parts of recruitment, such as chat or scheduling. Wrksense is different. It operates as a full AI recruiter that understands context, connects systems and supports the entire hiring process. Wrksense is designed to bring the connection back in recruitment and make every interaction better,” Connolly says.

“Wrksense also has recruiter logic built in,” he adds. “It doesn’t just automate the steps. It understands how recruiters think, question and prioritise. It can screen beyond prompts or CVs, adding real value and insight to every hiring conversation. It enables organisations to create their own AI team member who understands context, learns from experience and strengthens every stage of the recruitment process.”

Wrksense employs eight people and is looking to hire four new business development roles. To date, the company has raised €825,000 in pre-seed funding from a combination of sources, including founder and angel investment and Enterprise Ireland.

Wrksense makes its money by charging customers a yearly fee to use the assistant based on volume.

Connolly, who has recently completed the AI ecosystem accelerator delivered by NovaUCD and CeADAR (Ireland’s centre for AI), says the company is “preparing a new round of funding to enhance the agent’s AI interviewer capabilities, strengthen system integrations and scale globally”.

“We plan to expand into the US in early 2026, focusing on the pharmaceutical, healthcare, finance and aviation sectors. We’re at the very early stages of our fundraising and also considering strategic partners to help customers seamlessly add the benefits of AI to their hiring processes,” he says.

AI is a hot topic in boardrooms worldwide, with focus on where and how it’s relevant within a business or sector. Connolly estimates that more than 70 per cent of companies now use AI to some extent when hiring, and he says that, as AI is good at repetition, especially when it comes to administrative tasks, it’s a natural fit for recruitment. In theory, an AI agent could handle the entire recruitment process, but Connolly is not a fan of full automation.

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“AI can be effective for a lot of things, such as note-taking at interviews, scheduling, summarising conversations with candidates and answering routine questions. But when it comes to deciding who is the right fit for your business, that’s better left to humans. That’s why our system is ‘human in the loop AI’, meaning it’s there to support the recruiter, not replace them.

“In my experience, the human element is crucial if you want to get a broader sense of the person and see the whites of their eyes, as it were. Our AI agent is human-centric, and it can provide a lot of help by making things slicker, faster and more engaging, but it doesn’t make decisions about who gets the job, and, in my opinion, it never should.”

Bias has always been an issue in recruitment, and AI was seen as having a key role to play in removing it from the selection process. However, early versions of AI were far from perfect in this respect. “They were still incredibly biased because they were all trained on the same data set. That’s changed, and I firmly believe AI is better than humans at reducing bias – that’s the hill I’ll die on,” Connolly says. “It’s really a question of balance, blending the human side and the AI side to improve hiring for both organisations and candidates.”