Vardhan Kapoor, Firstwork

“When you think about AI coming into your company, you might worry it's here to replace your job. But it's almost the exact opposite; we come in with an emphasis on enhancing the worker. It's a human-first AI workflow, not an AI workflow that happens to automate humans.

What’s that mean? We focus on how to augment people more than augment companies. Some of our most exciting innovations come from conversations with workers about how to help them.

Take HR operations. Most people go into the job because they love working with people. They want to interview candidates. But there's all this stuff—20 or 40 tedious forms for every application—that makes their job less enjoyable, more stressful, and causes anxiety.

So let’s have AI handle the administrative work and unpleasant back-office tasks that most people didn't sign up for. AI can take away those pains and help people do what they want: hire great talent, then get that talent productive and generating value.

There are things that robots and AI do very well, and other things that humans do very well. We're enabling human-centered organizations to do what they do best: check for culture, get people onboarded, and keep the team doing all that excited and enthused by their work. AI is great at taking away the boring stuff holding them back—even if it can’t go and nurse somebody back to health.”