AI start-up Sapia.ai launches on AWS with global ambitions

A technology used by some of Australia’s employers as a recruitment tool could soon make assessments on anyone from politicians to CEOs.

Founder of recruitment AI platform Sapia.ai Barb Hyman. Picture: Aaron Francis

An Australian deep learning start-up which rose to fame for its AI-powered recruitment tool backed by some of the nation’s largest employers is moving beyond the HR space.

Sapia.ai, which has for the past few years served some of the nation’s major corporations as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) recruitment tool, is launching the availability of its machine-learning algorithms and data as an application programming interface via AWS.

The move will allow companies around the world to tap into models used effectively to run recruitment at some of the Australia’s biggest corporate employers like Qantas, David Jones, Suncorp and Starbucks.

Its founder, Barb Hyman, said Sapia.ai – formerly PredictiveHire – was no longer just a recruitment tool.

“We’re really a data company and what we’ve done is take data and build the ability to figure out humans through a conversation,” she said.

Sapia.ai had existed as somewhat of a bridge between a company and a job candidate in the initial stages of hiring for the past six years. It replaced a recruiter required to provide interviews in the first and second rounds of an application.

To date its models have been trained more than 20 million questions and answers from four million job applicants across 47 countries – and have the ability to detect when someone has used a generative AI product to answer questions in the recruitment process.

But unlike most recruiters, the tool also tells a candidate why they weren’t successful – a move which saved big corporations from losing customers who may have been unsuccessful in their job applications.

Many corporations believed Sapia.ai was more efficient than using recruiters, Ms Hyman said.

Investors and corporations alike appear to back Sapia.ai’s initial mission to disrupt recruitment which is often described as a long, often drawn-out and expensive process. In 2022, it raised a $17m series A led by Woolworths’ venture capital arm, W2, and Macquarie Capital.

Now its technology could be used across all industries via the API program to work out the personality and character of anyone from politicians to chief executives.

Ms Hyman said she’d already had interest from one US hedge fund which wanted to use the technology to make assessments of the CEOs before it invested in their companies.

Last Tuesday Ms Hyman told a Sydney AI summit she believed recruiters would disappear altogether in about five years. She also believed her technology would eventually phase out resumes, which she said were more “misrepresentative today than they were a year ago, given ChatGPT”.

“A resume is just this archaic artefact that’s been around for decades that is supposedly data that’s helping us to shortcut our process,” she told The Australian.

While convenient, a lot of the inferences made about people based off of resumes weren’t accurate and biased, Ms Hyman said.

“We all know we’re not very good at making decisions … you just need to look at things like the divorce rate and the turnover rate,” she said.

On Sapia.ai’s API program, the start-up was still testing out how it would charge customers and whether it was based on a subscription. It would first be launched on the AWS Marketplace.

On the future of HR, Ms Hyman said she believed it was heading in a direction where chatbots existed over the top of systems such as Workday, SAP and Oracle.

“A lot of HR is done to us and the careers are done for us, but people want to own their own career and determine their career path,” she said.

“The whole of HR will be disrupted and really inverted where data intelligence will be in the hands of the employee, not the HR function or the business function.”