“We’re very bullish about the prospects for the business,” Adylov said in a telephone interview. “We will build a very large software business in Montreal.”

Behavox’s artificial intelligence-based platform lets companies aggregate and analyze such internal data as email and voice calls to spot potential employee wrongdoing. It counts clients in industries including financial services, gold mining, oil and gas and telecommunications.

And with large chunks of the global workforce operating from home for the foreseeable future, the CEO says business is booming.

“Our clients are really struggling,” Adylov said. “Compliance teams are underwater with a flood of alerts. They’ve been hit by the fact everybody is working from home, which has created a decentralized risk map. They are getting a flood of work and they just don’t have the tools to be able to deal with this. That’s exactly why they come to us.”

Simply put, Behavox’s mission “is to organize all the internal data in the world and to make it useful,” Adylov said. “We want to organize every single email, every single chat into a usable stream of data, and artificial intelligence is at the front and centre of how we organize and how we make data useful. Machine-learning algorithms will be able to extract insights from the data to drive business intelligence for our clients. Machine learning and artificial intelligence are super-critical to our success and our product.”

That AI component is a key reason New York-based Behavox said in June it had picked Montreal to house a new global operations hub. The multi-year lease at Maison Manuvie represents a $35-million commitment, the company said at the time.

Behavox now has about 120 employees in Montreal, a number that the company said is growing by about one a day with the addition of engineers in fields such as data science and machine learning.

“We’re hiring a lot of technical talent,” Adylov said. “Given that Montreal has one of the biggest AI communities in the world, it was natural for us to come here. Montreal has a magnet in the form of strong research universities. There are a lot of reasons as to why people would want to come and be part of this community.”

A former equities analyst at Goldman Sachs who also spent time in the investment management industry, the Kyrgyzstan-born Adylov founded Behavox in London in 2014 before moving company headquarters to New York City two years ago.

Having relocated to Montreal this summer, he has high praise for the city’s — and Canada’s — artificial-intelligence strategy.

“Montreal over the decades has made smart investments in education, and Canada as a whole has made smart investments in immigration policy,” he said. “The combination of those ingredients is now coming to fruition. There’s a really friendly environment to bring talent to Canada, and a deep pool of talent. So as long as Canada positions itself as a global destination for talent, it’s going to continue to win in that race for artificial intelligence talent.”

And as a participant in that race, Behavox plans to go flat out.

“I would argue that in the next two or three years, we should be at 1,000 people” in Montreal, Adylov said. “We will need more space here.”