AI’s greatest value isn’t about speed or automation, but is making us more human, certainly a radical idea. Sentiva, a brand-new AI-native platform, aims to disrupt the HR technology landscape. It positions itself as more than a traditional HR Management System. Its ambition is to create workplaces that can sense, learn, and adapt. It doesn’t just automate HR transactions; it interprets patterns, responds to people in real-time, and supports predictive, strategic decision-making with intelligence and understanding.
L to R: Shamin Fernando – Associate Product Manager, Sentiva Shania Smith – Manager Brand & Growth, Sentiva Yohan Liyanage – Founder & CEO, Sentiva Rukshan Salgado – Director of Operations, Sentiva Nadeeja Samarakoon – Manager Product Strategy, Sentiva
Sentiva took center stage at the World Summit AI 2025, which was held at the Taets Art and Event Park in Amsterdam. It marked one of the first times a Sri Lankan-born company took the global AI stage not as a participant, but as a disruptor. More than 8,000 of the world’s largest tech companies and cutting-edge AI startups attended this global epicenter of artificial intelligence. The summit saw immersive displays of robotics and machine learning breakthroughs.
Yohan Liyanage, Founder and CEO of Sentiva, took his vision to the world. Sentiva’s booth at the summit attracted many veteran professionals in human resources and operations, shifting the AI conversation from speed and autonomy to emotion and well-being.
The Age of Acceleration and Disconnection
Over the past decade, organisations have used AI primarily for acceleration—speeding up hiring, automating workflows, and producing faster insights. Yet, employees have never felt more disconnected.
A recent Gallup study found that 77% of workers worldwide are disengaged. This costs companies nearly $9 trillion in lost productivity on an annual basis. The proliferation of digital tools has not helped. On average, companies now use over 100 separate SaaS applications across HR and Operations. This phenomenon is dubbed the “toggle tax”. Switching between platforms costs attention, focus, and understanding.
What results is a paradox. Modern working environments have become more streamlined but have lost consciousness. Organisations have become increasingly connected through digital means, having numbed emotional cultures. The “age of acceleration” has, in practice, become an age of distraction. Sentiva founders noticed this gap and deemed it a defining contradiction of the modern enterprise. Technology can analyse anything, except for how people truly feel at work.
A Platform Built for Awarness, Not Automation
Sentiva was born in Colombo and was validated by early adopters in Asia and North America. It represents a new generation of enterprise AI. Not simply a tool to accelerate the process, but for sensitivity. A workplace is like a living organism. It is made up of rhythm, signals, and relationships. For this organism to thrive, companies need more than just data; they need awareness. The premise is deceptively simple.
Sentiva calls this awareness, sentience. The ability for an organisation to sense, learn, and adapt in real-time. Too often, AI in HR has been engineered for efficiency and built to automate rather than to understand. Sentiva takes the opposite view: that its true promise lies in amplifying empathy at scale, helping organisations to sense, interpret, and respond to the human pulse of work.
Its proposition marks a subtle but significant shift. Just as the industrial era optimised itself for speed and delivery, the digital era needs to optimise for understanding. Most HR technology automates tasks; Sentiva’s objective is to systematise awareness. From how teams collaborate on projects, employees upskilling themselves, and maintaining motivation, the platform works to identify signals in the organisation, which can then be turned into insights. Its design philosophy draws from computer science, as well as neuroscience and behavioural economics. The AI technology powering Sentiva interprets contextual signals—not private conversations—to understand tone and sentiment at an organisational level. This is what might be called the “emotional metadata” of work.
The Keynote That Sparked Conversations
At World Summit AI 2025, Yohan delivered one of the event’s most talked-about keynotes titled “Empathy at Scale: How AI Is Enabling Organisations to Feel.”
World Summit AI 2025
While much of the discussion at the summit centered on using AI for automation and efficiency, Yohan offered a different perspective—inviting the audience to look beyond efficiency and consider emotion. He shifted the conversation from computation to consciousness, suggesting that the future of AI in business lies less in knowing and more in noticing—in awareness.
The keynote resonated, and in the days that followed, Sentiva’s booth became a gathering point for technologists, data scientists, and HR chiefs. Visitors were then not concerned with features, but with philosophy. Several attendees noted that Sentiva stood out for exploring not what AI can do, but what it can understand.
Yohan Liyanage, Founder and CEO of Sentiva
The conversation reflected a broader sentiment where the future of enterprise AI will be judged less by its computational speed and more by its capacity for ethical and emotional intelligence. For many attendees, Sentiva’s narrative offered a glimpse of an AI-enabled workplace that is not just efficient but emotionally literate.
Lumi: A Different Kind of Intelligence
At the heart of these discussions was Lumi, Sentiva’s conversational AI assistant. Unlike the digital agents that dominate enterprise demos, Lumi doesn’t just answer questions; it asks them. Built into the Sentiva platform, Lumi acts as both interface and interpreter, drawing on aggregate organisational insights and ethically gathered engagement signals to reveal the emotional texture of work—always within clear privacy and governance boundaries.
During live demos at the summit, attendees interacted with Lumi to discover their “workplace personas.” What began as a light-hearted quiz often turned into a reflective dialogue about teamwork, learning, and motivation. Lumi shows how conversational AI can build bridges instead of barriers.
In practical terms, Lumi’s advantage lies in context. Unlike most HR bots, which operate as detached service agents, Lumi is woven into every layer of the Sentiva ecosystem. This involves recruitment, engagement, and learning. Over time—and always within governance boundaries—Lumi learns the language of an organisation, its rhythms and idiosyncrasies, allowing leaders to perceive shifts in morale or cohesion long before they show up in survey data. Lumi’s differentiator is dialogue; it adds value to a sector that is saturated with competing or separate AI tools solely focused on automation and speed.
The Sentiva Circle: Attract. Retain. Grow.
Sentiva bases its products around the entire employee lifecycle, in a continuous, intelligent loop. It is among the first AI-native platforms to capture awareness across the full employee journey—from attraction to alumni. Sentiva collapses further into three distinct dimensions: Talent, People, and Ascend.
1. Sentiva Talent: Attract the Right People, Fairly and Fast
In recruitment, speed often sacrifices fairness. Sentiva Talent aims to restore both. Using AI to write role descriptions, score résumés, and conduct bias-aware interviews through Lumi, the platform brings structure and consistency to hiring, without losing the human touch.
Early adopters in technology and manufacturing report a 42% reduction in time-to-hire and measurable gains in candidate satisfaction. The system anonymizes key personal identifiers during initial screening, reducing unconscious bias and expanding access to underrepresented talent pools. As AI adoption accelerates, embedding fairness into algorithmic design has become a strategic imperative.
2. Sentiva People: Retain Through Real-Time Awareness
Once an employee joins, Sentiva People becomes the organisation’s living pulse. It observes engagement and connection at multiple levels offering each person private, personalised feedback, while providing leaders and HR teams with aggregated trends and gentle nudges. The intent is never to label or score disengagement, but to prompt human conversations that uncover causes and support well-being. In that sense, Sentiva People acts less as a monitor and more as a mirror, helping organisations see and respond with empathy.
Sentiva’s booth at World Summit AI 2025
Instead of waiting for annual reviews and surveys, leaders can notice shifts in engagement, friction between teams, and shifts in morale as they happen. The ability to recognize and respond early turns reactive management into proactive leadership, improving both culture and continuity. As one HR director put it, “It’s like giving your company a nervous system.”
3. Sentiva Ascend: Grow With Precision and Purpose
Traditional learning and performance systems often stop where feedback starts. Sentiva Ascend closes that loop.
After each appraisal, AI translates insights into a personalised growth kit—a data-backed learning journey visible to both manager and employee. It connects performance and progress. This process transforms an organisation by having it grow as fast as its people. In a market where skill half-lives are shrinking, Sentiva’s adaptive learning layer offers companies a route to continuous reskilling, where growth feels less like a compliance ritual and more like a conversation.
The Workshop: Rethinking Learning in Sentient Workplaces
To go beyond concept, Sentiva hosted a design-thinking session titled “Co-Designing the Future of Workplace Learning”, led by Rukshan Salgado, Director of Operations, and Dilushi Kulasinghe, Director of Customer Success. The workshop invited global learning and HR leaders to reimagine professional growth in an era of adaptive intelligence. Using Sentiva’s developing Ascend framework, participants explored what “sentient learning” might look like in continuous practice, contextual situations, and its ability to be co-created.
The Sentiva Team
For too long, workplace learning and performance management have lived in separate silos. The real breakthrough happens when they are brought into synergy. AI allows organisations to make that union both impactful and deeply personalised. Growth feels relevant, not ritualistic.
Beyond the event itself, the exercise underscored Sentiva’s broader thesis: that AI’s role in learning is not to replace mentors, but to help organisations become better ones.
A Critical Moment in the AI–HR Intersection
Sentiva launches at a moment of paradox in the HR technology market. Firms have more data than ever, yet employees feel increasingly invisible. Analysts predict that by 2027, more than half of workplace AI initiatives will falter in raising engagement, largely because they prioritise processes over people.
Regulators are catching up as well. The EU’s AI Act has placed new emphasis on explainability and bias mitigation in employment algorithms. These areas are where Sentiva’s human-centric design could become a competitive advantage. AI that ignores emotion ignores context. Sentiva’s model puts the human system back at the center of the technical one.
“AI’s greatest value isn’t about speed or automation, but is making us more human, certainly a radical idea”
By embedding emotional context into its systems, Sentiva reframes HR technology from automation to augmentation—technology not as manager, but as mediator.
The Road Ahead: Promise and Proof
As Sentiva enters the European market, it faces the challenge common to all category creators, which is turning philosophy into proof at scale. In the coming year, the company plans to deepen integrations, expand Lumi’s behavioural-modelling capabilities, and roll out Sentiva to select enterprise partners. The goal is to demonstrate that a “sentient workplace” isn’t idealism, but infrastructure. Not just adoption, but transformation.
“AI’s role isn’t to replace empathy—it’s to make it actionable,” Yohan noted in Amsterdam. “The future belongs to organisations that use technology to listen better, understand deeper, and respond with humanity at scale.” The claim is bold, but its appeal lies in its restraint. In an industry obsessed with disruption, Sentiva’s promise is restoration.
From Sri Lanka to the World
What makes Sentiva’s rise noteworthy isn’t just its technology, but where it comes from. In a region better known for outsourcing than innovation, a Sri Lankan company is now helping to shape the global debate on human-centred AI.
Sentiva began with a question: What if organisations could feel? At World Summit AI 2025, it found its answer: they can. And perhaps more importantly, they must.