Oyster, a global employment platform that empowers companies to hire, pay, and care for their international teams, has launched Pearl, an AI-powered chatbot that can answer questions about worldwide hiring and remote work regulations. Leveraging Oyster’s wealth of knowledge and ability to help anyone, anywhere, hire quickly and compliantly in over 180 countries, Pearl revolutionizes how companies gather information, enabling them to make informed decisions that remove traditional barriers to global employment.
By applying AI to resources like Oyster’s Global Hiring Guides and Remote Work Regulations, Pearl gives users a more intuitive and personalized experience when seeking answers on everything from benefits policies to taxes and more—rather than having to search and read through large amounts of static, outdated, or hard-to-find information.
Oyster enables growing companies to give valued international team members the desired experience without the usual headaches or expense. Oyster helps people-centric hiring anywhere in the world with reliable, compliant contracts, payroll, and great local benefits and perks.
Regarding the development, Margaret Wu, Lead Investor at Georgian, an Oyster investor, said:
Oyster’s platform empowers users to leverage extensive knowledge and insights on global employment, compliance, and compensation. Moving quickly to deploy Pearl, their AI chatbot, not only makes these insights more accessible to customers and the public but demonstrates the company’s ongoing commitment to innovation.
Applying AI to current resources is just the beginning of Oyster’s exploration of this cutting-edge technology, and the lessons learned will assist in broadening and deepening the breadth and depth of its AI solution. In the future, Pearl’s AI chatbot functionality will be available on all Oyster web pages. At the same time, more advanced efforts will include insights from The Reef—an open-source employee guide with best practices for building distributed, asynchronous teams—and the company’s proprietary global employment data.
Michael McCormick, SVP of Product & Engineering, Oyster, commented:
Organizations often don’t realize how hard global employment is until they must be responsible for it—especially when hiring for multiple functions, levels, and modalities in various countries and currencies. It’s exciting to leverage AI alongside our insights in a chatbot that can help navigate the complexities of global and remote employment in a compliant, easy-to-use way. Moreover, we’re passionate about applying these learnings to structured and proprietary datasets that allow us to build a knowledge engine that truly automates how companies hire, pay, and care for their employees worldwide.
Tony Jamous and Jack Mardack, founded Oyster in January 2020 to upend the status quo and create a more egalitarian world of employment. The platform is focused on developing software and resources that allow businesses worldwide to hire, pay, and care for talent from anywhere. Increasing employment opportunities may benefit people, communities, local economies, and the environment. The idea is to establish a positive chain reaction all across the planet.
In April 2022, the startup raised $150 million in Series C funding at a $1 billion-plus valuation. The round was led by Georgian with participation from Salesforce Ventures, LinkedIn, the Base10 Partners Advancement Initiative, Okta, Endeavour Catalyst, and existing investors.
