Dhruv Jaglan believes the biggest limitation in workflow automation today is not technology, but usability.
“Automation should not force users to think like system designers,” he said. “It should understand the work they are trying to get done and build around that.”
Jaglan, co-founder of Work Atoms, has spent much of his career working on systems designed to operate at scale. After studying Computer Science at IIT Bombay, he joined LinkedIn, where he worked on enterprise software, distributed systems, and products used by millions of professionals globally. The experience gave him firsthand exposure to how large organizations manage operations, coordinate teams, and depend on software infrastructure to maintain efficiency across functions.
He later co-founded BabbleBots, an AI recruiting platform that conducts voice-based interviews for engineering and sales candidates. The company focused on automating early-stage hiring processes, particularly repetitive screening rounds that consume significant recruiter time. By using conversational AI, the platform aimed to reduce delays in recruitment while improving consistency in candidate evaluation.
BabbleBots has conducted tens of thousands of interviews and worked with multiple listed companies in India, including Welspun Living. The experience exposed Jaglan to the operational realities of enterprise workflows and how much time teams continue to spend on repetitive tasks that often involve switching between tools, coordinating approvals, and manually updating systems.
“We believe a large part of the world’s work can be automated, but today that work is scattered across many different tools, systems, and workflows,” Jaglan said. “People spend a lot of time on operational work that does not really require human creativity or judgment.”
That observation eventually led to the creation of Rilo, Work Atoms’ workflow automation platform. Instead of requiring users to manually design workflows step by step, Rilo allows them to describe tasks in plain language. The system then interprets the request, builds the automation, and manages the workflow logic in the background. The goal, according to Jaglan, is to make automation feel less like programming and more like delegation.
For Jaglan, the problem with many existing automation platforms is that they still require users to think structurally about triggers, blocks, integrations, and workflows before they can automate even simple processes.
“Most people think workflow automation is about connecting apps using fixed templates,” he said. “But real work is much messier than that. Workflows involve changing context, approvals, multiple systems, and exceptions.”
He argues that businesses often struggle not because automation tools are unavailable, but because the tools themselves introduce complexity. Teams that understand operations may still depend heavily on technical specialists to implement and maintain automations, creating another operational bottleneck.
The challenge, according to him, is not simply building automations, but making them dependable enough for enterprise use.
“The toughest part has been reliability,” Jaglan said. “In enterprise workflows, it is not enough for an automation to work most of the time. Companies need systems they can trust consistently.”
Work Atoms recently raised 1.5 million dollars in seed funding led by Peak XV Partners. The company is currently focused on expanding enterprise integrations, improving deployment capabilities, and refining workflow reliability for early customers adopting the platform in day-to-day operations.
Jaglan says the broader vision is to make automation accessible to people who understand business problems but may not have technical expertise.
“The idea behind Rilo was to help people get back time,” he said. “Users should be able to describe the work they want automated instead of manually figuring out every step themselves.”
