SkillDrill – Advanced Conversational AI, Engineered for the Workplace
A Product Built to Solve a Problem We Kept Watching Play Out
Building software for UK employers means sitting in meeting rooms hearing the same conversation. A manager wants to know who on the team can put together a financial model. The answer is “Steve, probably?” Steve hasn’t built a financial model since 2014. Meanwhile Sara on the other side of the office did three years of management accounts before retraining, and nobody knows. The job description never asked.
We watched this play out across organisations of every size, from charities to councils, growing businesses to NHS teams, and the response was almost always the same. Hire externally. Train someone from scratch. Or quietly over-promise and hope nobody notices.
The tools that were supposed to fix this never quite did. HR audits are out of date the day they’re filed. Self-service skills forms sit half-completed in every system we ever looked at. Generic skills taxonomies bear no real relation to the work the business is actually trying to deliver. So we built something different.
SkillDrill is a conversational AI platform that talks to each employee for a few minutes, draws out what they’ve actually done, and turns it into a live skills profile mapped against what the business itself needs. It runs from application stage through onboarding, team planning and internal mobility, and gives the people running the organisation a single, current picture of who can do what.
The result is an organisation that stops guessing. Managers know who they have. Recruitment teams stop hiring externally for skills the business already owns. Employees stop being pigeonholed by the job they happened to walk through the door for. The work the platform does happens in the background, and the time it saves goes back into the work that actually matters to the business.
Security and welfare, by design
Security and data privacy are pivotal to anything we build, and SkillDrill is no exception. FullyCoded has spent years in secure application development for sectors where audit trails, tenant isolation and tight access controls are not optional, and that experience runs through the whole platform. Personal data is encrypted at rest and in transit, access is logged, and the system has been built to UK GDPR standards from the ground up rather than retrofitted at the end.
Welfare matters just as much. SkillDrill talks directly to employees, which means it sometimes hears things that have nothing to do with skills. We designed the platform to recognise that. The AI doesn’t try to diagnose anyone, doesn’t make decisions about hiring or promotion, and doesn’t score or rank people. When sensitive disclosures come up, mentions of stress, harassment, caring responsibilities or significant personal difficulty, SkillDrill flags them for a designated human inside the organisation, usually HR, a safeguarding lead or a line manager, who decides what to do next. The AI never acts on those signals on its own. Judgement about people stays with the people who know them.
Where we are now
SkillDrill is live at skilldrill.co.uk and currently in trial with UK organisations across the private, public and voluntary sectors. It joins TLDTrack and the wider range of business software we run, and it’s a working example of how we approach product work. Identify a real problem. Build something that solves it properly. Run it reliably.
If you’ve got a problem in your business that off-the-shelf software won’t fix, this is the kind of thing we build. Get in touch.