Ares Intelligence AI Adoption Plans Get 2.6M Euro Backing

Ares Intelligence AI Adoption plans are getting fresh backing, after the London-based startup secured 2.6 million euros in funding to turn employee insights into evidence-led plans for bringing AI into everyday business work. According to EU-Startups, the round was backed by Creandum and Lakestar, with participation from angels connected to Google DeepMind.

The startup describes its platform as an evidence-based tool for AI transformation. Rather than asking a handful of senior managers where AI might help, it interviews the people who do the work every day, then turns what they share into a prioritised roadmap.

Ares Intelligence was founded in 2026 by Matt Falconer and Alfie Ranstead, who is 21. The pair built the company to solve a problem they met first-hand while running Instruct, their previous automation company: customers wanted to automate parts of their business but had no reliable way of knowing where to begin.

That knowledge gap is the heart of the pitch. Many businesses know they need to adopt AI, but the first step is often guesswork, shaped by vendor demos and internal politics rather than evidence from the shop floor.

How Ares Intelligence AI Adoption Interviews Work

The platform deploys an AI interviewer that holds confidential, voice-based conversations with every employee in an organisation, in more than 70 languages. Within weeks, leadership receives a prioritised, evidence-led roadmap identifying where AI can save time and money.

The interviewer is designed to surface things a survey would miss. According to EU-Startups, it captures knowledge from the people closest to day-to-day work, and identifies gaps such as manual workarounds, broken handoffs between teams, and the use of unapproved AI tools inside the business.

Privacy controls are central to the design. Ares Intelligence AI Adoption interviews run under GDPR and SOC 2 compliance, with anonymisation controls that let businesses mask names, redact voices, or strip role metadata before reports reach leadership. Customers can deploy the platform on their own cloud or use Ares infrastructure, in the EU or the US, with data retention windows set by the business.

Speed is another selling point. The founders say the entire process, from training employees on what AI can do through individual interviews to drafting recommendations, takes weeks rather than the months usually taken by a consulting firm.

Early Results From the Shop Floor

Since launch, Ares Intelligence has signed enterprise customers across Europe and the United States in approximately seven months. The most concrete example so far comes from Tremonia, a Mercedes-Benz spin-out, which uncovered more than 400 hours of avoidable manual work per month within four weeks of the AI interviewer speaking to everyone from senior leadership to the paint shop floor.

That example shows why the bottom-up approach appeals to investors. Ares Intelligence AI Adoption evidence comes from the full workforce, not just the departments that already speak the language of digital transformation. A paint shop worker and a finance manager may both waste hours on manual steps, but only one of them is likely to be invited into a strategy workshop.

Investor comments in the announcement underline the same point. Richard Keuntje, vice president at Creandum, said enterprise AI today is mostly coding, and that is only the start, with the opportunity across the rest of the business far bigger and still largely untapped. Enrico Mellis, venture partner at Lakestar, said the gap between AI ambition and real-world evidence is the right challenge to back.

Falconer, the co-founder and chief executive, put it more plainly. According to EU-Startups, he said the people doing the work every day have a huge amount of knowledge about where AI could make a difference, but they are rarely asked, and Ares gives them a voice across departments, countries, and languages.

Why Evidence-Led Adoption Matters Now

The Ares Intelligence AI Adoption approach lands at a moment when many companies are under pressure to show returns from AI spending. Coding assistants delivered fast, visible wins for engineering teams, but the rest of the business has been slower to follow, partly because nobody mapped where the time actually goes.

That mapping problem connects to the wider agent economy. Enterprises are learning that deploying agents without understanding workflows leads to tools nobody trusts. A recent report on supervised agents for identity operations showed the same lesson from a security angle: oversight and evidence matter as much as capability. Ares applies the idea earlier in the process, before any agent is deployed at all.

The same pattern appears in sector-specific agent funding, where investors back tools tuned to one industry's workflows, as seen in coverage of agentic AI for finance work. Ares is broader than one sector, but narrower than a general consultancy: it owns a single step, the diagnosis, and tries to do it better than anyone else.

What comes next will test whether interviews scale into lasting change. A roadmap is only useful if leadership acts on it, and the company has not disclosed how many of its early customers moved from roadmap to deployment. The fresh capital will help Ares expand operations and bring its approach to more businesses, according to the company, and those follow-through numbers will be the ones to watch.

For now, the funding marks a bet on a simple idea: the best guide to where AI belongs in a business is the workforce already doing the work, if someone finally asks them properly.

Sources: reporting by EU-Startups; company site Ares Intelligence.