Textio today launched an addition to its AI platform: Interview Feedback - which quickly creates clear, compliant, and skills-based assessments of candidates, so organizations stop losing money on poor-fit hires that don't work out.

GeekWire’s startup coverage documents the Pacific Northwest entrepreneurial scene. Sign up for our weekly startup newsletter , and check out the GeekWire funding tracker and venture capital directory .Ryan Sloan.Editor’s note: Ryan Sloan, a data scientist based in Seattle, wrote this guest post after assessing the GeekWire 200, our list of top Pacific Northwest startups.I recently read that a company in Finland is using AI to find the “perfect coffee blend.” And here I am buying an imperfect blend of beans from a local coffee roaster like a sucker.There’s little question that AI is everywhere. I have a wide network of product managers and data scientists, and the vast majority of them are working on an AI integration or product of some sort. Companies talk about AI with enthusiasm — who doesn’t want “perfect” coffee?The market’s roaring enthusiasm for AI technology doesn’t transfer to individuals, though. Gallup’s 2024 survey found that only 13% of Americans believe AI does more good than harm. On top of that, 77% don’t trust businesses to use AI responsibly.I’m a data scientist in Seattle, so I wondered: how are local companies approaching the AI trend? Is it really everywhere in the startup bubble, or am I in an even smaller AI bubble? Is the hype out of control? Are they publicly committed to responsibility? (Spoiler: You’re not going to like all the answers).I took a deep dive into the public-facing content of some of the fastest-growing startups in the Pacific Northwest to analyze their AI-related language.Data and methodsThe GeekWire 200 is a ranked list of 200 fast-growing startups in the Pacific Northwest

Textio co-founder and former CEO Kieran Snyder. (Photo courtesy of Kieran Snyder). Understanding bias in workplace communication, whether it’s in job descriptions, performance feedback or elsewhere, was a founding objective of Textio, the Seattle-based augmented writing startup.Co-founder Kieran Snyder stepped away as CEO of the 11-year-old company a year ago, but she’s still hard at work analyzing the impact of bias, especially as it relates to the current rise of large language models and generative AI.Snyder launched a website last February called Nerd Processor in which the linguistics PhD shares her data stories, revisits prior research and discusses new research.On a new episode of the “Shift AI” podcast, Snyder discussed her views of the evolving landscape of AI in workplace communications.She revealed details of an experiment she ran in which she asked ChatGPT to write sample performance feedback for a digital marketer who had a tough first year on the job who went to Harvard University, and also a digital marketer who had a tough first year on the job who went to Howard University, the prominent historically Black college and university.“I did hundreds of queries where the only difference was the alma mater, Harvard versus Howard. And it was fascinating,” Snyder said (12:00 mark below). “The development areas that the system imagines will be needed for people who go to Harvard are things like ‘you should step up to lead more.’ But the development areas it imagines for the Howard alums are things like, ‘you don’t have good attention to detail; you have missing technical skills.'”While Snyder said those can be valid feedback comments, and it would be difficult to look at any one document from the experiment and put your finger on the bias, looking at the data in aggregate tells a different story. The types of feedback that the system associates with people who went to the historically black college and university are much more functional and fundamental in nature.She told “Shift AI” host Boaz Ashkenazy that it was a perfect example of how building a data set with this kind of bias in mind from the start just produces samples that propagate the bias.Listen to the full episode below, and subscribe to the Shift AI Podcast and hear more episodes at ShiftAIPodcast.com