The things you'd ask before you'd say yes.

More openly than they talk to a survey, and often more openly than they talk to their manager. A conversation with an agent has no career consequence attached to it: nobody is watching your face, nobody is going to remember you said it in a meeting.

That said, participation depends far more on you than on us. When leadership explains why the conversation is happening and what will be done with it, people take part. When it arrives unexplained, they don't. Getting that launch right is part of what a NICH partner does with you.

Voice-based and conversational, 20 to 40 minutes depending on which assessment you run. The agent asks a question, listens to the answer, and then follows up on what it heard, the way a skilled interviewer would.

That follow-up is the whole point. A survey can only ask what it already knew to ask. When someone hesitates, contradicts themselves, or says something unexpected, Emersen can go there.

Yes, at every point. Participation is voluntary, any question can be passed, and a conversation can be ended without explanation. A listening exercise that people are compelled into stops being a listening exercise.

One conversation per person, scheduled when it suits them. There is no prep, no homework, and no follow-up survey. For most organizations the entire listening window runs two to three weeks.

Not you, and not their manager. Findings are reported at the level of themes and groups, never as an individual transcript handed to leadership. Verbatim quotes appear in the report only with identifying details removed, and only where a group is large enough that the speaker can't be inferred from it.

The full detail of our data handling is on the security page.

No, and we won't support an engagement designed that way. Emersen exists because we believe the organizations that come through the AI shift well will be the ones that understood their people, not the ones that cut deepest.

Findings are never delivered as individual performance data, because they aren't individual performance data. If an organization's goal is to build a case for reductions, we're the wrong partner and we'll say so on the first call.

Before the conversation starts, plainly: what the assessment is for, how their input will be reported, and what leadership will and won't see. People give you honest answers when they understand the terms, and the terms have to be true.

It's built to. Emersen runs on dedicated infrastructure with encryption in transit and at rest, access limited to authorized NICH personnel, and no use of your data to train external models. Bring your security team to the first call, we'd rather answer their questions early than at the end.

A findings report and a NICH partner to walk you through it: an executive summary, scores across the nine dimensions, the verbatim evidence behind each finding, where sentiment splits by group, and a sequenced roadmap with owners.

You can see the shape of it in the sample report on the homepage.

A survey gives you a number and leaves you to guess at the reason. Emersen gives you the reason, because it asked.

The other difference is reach. Understanding at this depth used to require sitting down with people one at a time, which meant sampling a fraction of the organization. Emersen holds that conversation with everyone.

It doesn't have to. Plenty of organizations keep an annual pulse for trending and use Emersen when they need to understand something properly, before a rollout, after a reorg, or when a score moved and nobody can explain why.

Typically four to six weeks end to end: a week or two to design and launch, two to three weeks of conversations, then analysis and the readout with your NICH partner.

Then you've learned something worth knowing, which is the point. We won't soften findings to make a readout more comfortable, and we won't hand you a problem without a recommendation.

Worth saying plainly: asking people what they think creates an expectation that something will follow. If leadership isn't prepared to act on what surfaces, the honest advice is to wait until it is.

Because of what going first buys you. The pilot cohort is small and works directly with the founders rather than an account team, shapes what gets built next, and does it on terms that won't exist once this is a mature product.

What isn't experimental is the methodology. The nine-dimension framework behind Emersen has been refined over nearly a decade of in-person work with organizations that went on to earn Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For recognition. Emersen is how that practice scales, not a first attempt at it.

An executive sponsor who will put their name to the launch, a working session or two to design the assessment around what you actually need to know, and a willingness to tell us candidly what worked and what didn't. That last part is the real cost of a pilot, and it's the part we care most about.

Pilot engagements are scoped to the size of your organization and which assessments you run, and priced per engagement rather than per employee. We'll put real numbers in front of you on the first call rather than make you fill out a form to find out.

Organizations looking to justify a decision they've already made. Leadership teams that want a number for a board deck rather than an answer. And anyone hoping this is the AI tool that lets them run the same company with fewer people, that isn't what we built.