Rekbot: A Product ‘Bourne’ In My Own Personal Pain

What started as a frustrated founder’s battle to squeeze more performance out of a lean recruitment team turned into an award-winning AI startup. And believe me, I didn’t see it coming.

I’m Will Bourne. Over the last 15 years, I’ve been training and onboarding recruiters. I founded two startups from scratch and was Managing Director of Nichol Curtin, one of London’s biggest fintech recruitment firms. Despite all that experience, training and onboarding felt like a broken record. Seriously—it hadn’t changed since I first started.

Here’s the issue: Recruitment teams are still stuck in the past with outdated methods. Founders (me included!) were expecting recruiters to bill more, adapt faster, and handle more complexity—especially with AI reshaping the industry—but we were still using training techniques from decades ago.

I tried it all. Literally. First, I hired expensive trainers (£1,000 a day!). Didn’t work. Next, I signed up to a self-serve e-learning platform (£250 a month). Failed again. Even when I personally trained my top performers, productivity dipped, and new starter turnover stayed painfully high.

I hit a wall. But frustration can spark something brilliant, and that’s exactly what happened next.

I decided if nothing else worked, I’d build it myself—even though I’m not a tech guy. So, I created a conversational AI app that simulated real client interactions, focusing on cold calls. Suddenly, my team’s confidence skyrocketed. They could handle tough objections, articulate value clearly, and map out success on every call.

Initially, it felt like a cool internal experiment—nothing more. But when I shared it with a few mates facing the same issues, their excitement blew me away. Even my dad, who spent 30 years in car sales, described it as “brutal but brilliant.” – The AI Agent hung up on him! That was when I realised this might actually be a product.

Fast forward a few months, and I was standing at the Recruitment Expo in Birmingham with my AI app—now named “Rekbot.” We had balloons, banners, the whole nine yards, just to test if the market liked it. The response was beyond anything I imagined: queues formed, over 20 immediate sign-ups, and the excitement made it clear I had struck gold.

One clever thing I did: instead of guessing pricing myself, I let demo users tell me what they thought Rekbot was worth. That exercise alone gave me huge insight into how recruiters valued the platform.

Since then, things moved fast. I hired Mohammed Rashid—an absolute machine with previous AI startup success—to lead the engineering team. We got 37 more companies involved as beta testers and carefully selected our first ten committed early adopters. I even relocated to Dubai, a booming AI innovation hub, to launch the next era of recruitment training and automation.

And just recently, Rekbot took home 3rd place out of 20 cutting-edge AI startups at the FutureTech World Cup qualifiers at the Dubai AI Festival. Sharing the stage with incredible startups validated everything we’ve been building.

Huge shout-out to Decoding Data Science, Dubai AI Campus, and everyone supporting this crazy journey.

This isn’t just about building cool tech—it’s about fundamentally changing how recruitment teams learn, onboard, and grow. And trust me, we’re just getting started.

#Recruitment #AI #StartupJourney #FounderLife #Innovation #Rekbot #FutureTech #DubaiAI #RecruitmentInnovation #Leadership #TechStartup #FounderStories #BusinessGrowth #AIRevolution #DubaiStartups #TeamDevelopment #RecruitmentTraining #SuccessMindset