Can AI Be A Force For Good In Improving Diversity In Hiring?

Khyati Sundaram is the CEO and Chairperson of Applied. Founded in 2016, Applied's mission is to be the essential platform for unbiased hiring. To that end, the company offers a comprehensive hiring platform relied on by clients like Ogilvy and UNICEF to improve diversity by applying lessons from behavioral science, such as anonymizing applications and removing gendered language from job descriptions. Throughout the company's history, Applied has been hesitant to use machine learning on its platform given the potential of AI to amplify the very harmful biases the company is seeking to prevent. However, after years of research, Applied now sees a disruptive opportunity to train and deploy models to help ensure that humans make fairer hiring decisions at scale.