The American Advantage, with Vardhan Kapoor

Greetings fellow optimists. I'm Sophie Singletary and I'm Viola Barnett and we're so excited to welcome you all to today's podcast installment of Working Intelligence, the AI Optimism Project. As reminder, this is our initiative dedicated to telling the story of AI on the ground in the United States. And today we're thrilled to be joined by Vardhan Kapoor, co-founder and CEO of First Work, an AI company rewiring how America's essential workforce is hired onboarded and integrated. First Work is on a mission to eliminate friction from the labor market and get American workers hired faster, which is part of why we remain optimistic about AI in the U.S. Vardhan, it's a joy to have you on with us today. Excited to be here. As we all know, the labor market is always top of mind for Americans. The U.S. is staring down a shortfall of 3 million healthcare workers by 2026 and by 2030 more than 2 million manufacturing jobs could sit empty. What does First Work do to close that gap? Yeah, it's a great question. So as you shared, First Work is a AI first platform dedicated to removing the barriers for compliant hiring and boarding for American workers. If you think about the healthcare industry as an example, healthcare hiring in America is highly seasonal. If you think about the cold and flu season in the northern states, there's a massive increase in demand during certain points in the year and that ebbs and flows based on sickness, health, and all these other factors. Right now, if a organization is looking to hire healthcare workers, nurses, carers, they often have to do a lot of forecasting, demand planning, and if they do try to do it and if they don't get it right, they're sort of in a really bad place because they don't have enough workers. And the root of this is that it takes two, maybe three months from when a healthcare worker, oftentimes more, four or five months from when someone gets a job offer to when they can start work. And the reason this is the case is because there's hours and hours, weeks of background checks, forms, credentials, bureaucracy that prevents the worker getting into the role. What First Work does is build an AI-native approach to handling all of that administration, all of those background checks, all of those credentials. We meet the worker at the earliest point in the application flow. We help them correct the information that they submit to make sure that it is accurate. And by doing that, from a first-principle approach, we have helped organizations bring time to hire down from maybe five weeks down to a few days, in some cases, hours, because of that focus on the worker. Using the example of healthcare workers, you mentioned time to hire as the kind of north star for first work. I'm curious, why is that the go-to metric? And how does that empower these communities of frontline workers, healthcare workers among them, and blue-collar workers more generally? Yeah, so I think there's two reasons why time to hire is such a core metric for us. The first is for the hiring organization. It helps them really ensure that when there is an increase in demand, they can find an increase in labor supply to meet that. So they, once again, we've got large healthcare groups that have sophisticated PhD statistical teams mapping out labor forecasting, but not everyone has that, right? So if you're a small nursing home or small care home, and there's a bad week or a bad month, and you need to think, "Okay, I need 20 people to come in this month," and it takes you three months for someone to get credentialed, you're going to have a situation where the people who need care aren't getting care, even though you have jobs that could be filled. So it's bad for the ecosystem, it's bad for people. And then from an actual worker perspective, one of the big things that we are laser focused on is the health and the financial health of the American worker. And time to hire is a critical statistic for us, because if you think about what happens when people can't find roles or when people are waiting two, three months for a role that they have signed an offer for to actually start because they're spending all that time demanding checks and credential checks, people may not have that many savings. People might be facing a utility bill, rent is due, and that's when they revert to parts of the economy that we are not a huge fan of at First Work. So payday lending is one example. The payday lending industry in America is issuing between $30 and $50 million of loans a day, and these are going at an average of 400% APR. People are taking a small loan to help them pay their rent that they then pay out for the next six months. And they're taking that loan because they're waiting for a job to start or they're waiting to move to the next step in a process. They are ready for work. They have everything that they need to get the job done, but there's just legacy administrative bureaucracy that's stopping them from getting in that role. And a quick follow up here, you outlined a reality faced by millions of Americans. And you mentioned the sector of healthcare. I'm curious what the other sectors are that First Work works on and works with. Yeah, so we have a real focus on high volume seasonal businesses or industries where there is labor market volatility. So logistics, light industrial, manufacturing, staffing, these are all parts of the economy where there is an ebb and flow of workers based on, as we mentioned, right now we're entering the logistic peak season. We got Thanksgiving, we got Christmas, we got Black Friday. People are spending money. They're buying gifts for their family. So whenever a large e-commerce store prints a bunch of money in terms of, hey, we've had a great border, there's real jobs that are created by that. And those jobs are going to the American worker. But it needs to be done in a way that accounts for the complexity of getting those people onboarded. So yeah, heavily on that part of the economy right now. I want to dig into the psyche of the American worker a little bit. A lot of blue collar workers hear AI and think that tech is coming for my job. You argue that First Work shows the opposite. How do you prove that AI is protecting and expanding American opportunity rather than replacing it? Yeah. So I think from our point of view, it's crazy when you take a step back to think about the barriers that have been put in place to getting people into work right now. We spend a lot of time with workers. Light industrial and manufacturing is a huge part of where we're focused on right now. And thinking about all the amazing stuff that's happening in that space, one of our views is you cannot reindustrialize America without the American worker. If you think about a individual who's maybe worked in manufacturing for a while, maybe there's a new factory opening up, maybe there's a new data center, maybe there's a new... If you think about some of the big investments that have happened in the U.S. just with some of the things happening in Ohio as an example, there's great roles that are opening up, but workers are finding themselves having a very hard time getting into those roles because of all of these layers of bureaucracy. Even a simple role can take 12, 15, 18 forms to get through. And these are not individuals who got into this job to fill out forms. They're not people who got into this job to sit there doing administration for hours on end. Our view is that we can help the worker handle all of that really messy unpleasantness that could act as a hindrance to them getting the role, that could lead to them facing friction so that they can focus on the parts of the job that they love and enjoy the most. Work is both meaningful and is a critical component of human dignity. That said, a lot of businesses operate maximizing instead for efficiency gains and cost savings and so forth, rightfully so. And a lot of American businesses think of tech as a means of lowering these costs. Though with first work, there's a case to be made that you all both enhance human dignity and improve employer efficiency. I'm wondering if you can speak to that. It goes back to one of the reasons why we started first work, right, which is I think that in, I'm not going to say in Silicon Valley because we're here in New York, but in Silicon Valley and tech and white collar industries, you know, if you're in banking, finance, consulting, many of the other wonderful professions that exist in this city, in this country, I think we're often spoiled by the very large teams that companies have to handle HR administration and operations and then be the very premium software that's often been built for these high spend industries. So, you know, I think I shared in a previous life, I spent a lot of time in the maritime industry. And, you know, when people, seafarers are moving from one port to another, or, you know, logistics workers are taking on a new role, they're, they don't have a 50% operational administration team calling them up, you know, with white glove treatment. They don't have super sleek high end portals designed for them. They're living on tech that was built in the 80s. They're oftentimes lost and confused. They're filling out forms the best of their abilities. But once again, it's form 14 out of 18. And, you know, it's painful and it's not enjoyable. And it's scary because if you get something wrong, maybe you misremembered a date, maybe you haven't checked something in a while, maybe you just want to rush and get out the door, you might find yourself rejected from a job that you know you're qualified for, because the systems are not built for you. So, our view is to bring back dignity and to bring back productivity. There's things that AI is very good at, and this is one of the things that we think AI is very good at. At Working Intelligence, we're AI optimists, but we're also specifically AI optimists regarding the American advantage in the AI era. And how is first work built to unlock the American advantage in the AI era? It's a great question. I think one of the things we touched on as well. So, I spent a lot of time outside the States growing up, and it was while I was outside America, I think you oftentimes get a somewhat simplistic view of, you know, what success is and how to be a successful individual and worker. You're hardworking, you're intelligent, you're maybe a little bit lucky. It was when I moved to the States and when I started working in the ecosystem here, they realized that agency is probably the most important thing to being a successful and productive worker and member of any society. And there is no group of individuals in the world who have higher agency than the American worker. But what they're facing is this cumulative, you know, sort of accumulation of bureaucracy where, you know, you could be the highest agency worker in the world. But if you're going through and fighting through 20, 30 years of legacy forms and systems that have been piled up that are not designed for you, that are not designed for the place that you are, it is exceptionally frustrating. So what we're trying to do is help those workers, you know, take advantage of the agency that have, get into the jobs that they know that they're suitable for without having to deal with all of this very, very unpleasant administration so they can unlock their own potential. Sure. And you mentioned just their human agency and autonomy that seems like a critical component of the kind of American spirit, the American ethos of the American worker. You also mentioned bureaucracy which can bog down this human agency. To the converse though, what do you think it is about the American capitalist system of free enterprise and innovation that you think actually unleashes this worker agency and autonomy? Yeah, I think it's a, you know, it's a system that rewards people who put in the work, right? And that sounds really trite when you say it, but I think there's a lot of places in the world where you can put in all the work that you want, but there are powers that be that are out of your control that prevent you from really getting the fruits of your labor rewarded to you. America's one of the few places. And yeah, it's shown in the evidence, right? Like this is the greatest place in the world to start a tech company. It's the greatest place in the world to start any kind of company because it has the institutions and the ecosystem to allow individuals with, you know, a good idea and a lot of grit and a lot of agency and a lot of resilience and build that into some of the household names that we know today. You're exemplary of that. I'm with you. At the end of the day, HR is really more than algorithms and automation. It really is about humans. How did you go about keeping the human at the center of first work? Why do you think it's so critical to keep humans at the center of any new tech? I mean, it's crazy you mentioned that. So I'm walking in today with the new first work jacket and you got our mask right here, which is a human worker being blast off into their new job. And I think I love it. You know, there's a reason we have a laser focus on time to hire. That's a metric that, you know, when I sit down with our engineering team and our internal teams every morning, the question we ask is how do we bring that metric down because it is a metric that really encapsulates the candidate and the worker experience, right? It's as simple as if the worker is being onboarded quickly and compliantly, the experience is better and they're able to get into work and they're able to start their new jobs. And if they're not, they're not, right? So we have a laser focus that we sit down not just with our customers, which are the organizations, but their customers. I mean, some of the stories we've held organizations bring their time to hire down as mentioned from weeks to days and in some cases days to hours and I'll sit down with those teams and reason the payday lending thing is so prevalent is we talk to companies and people, we talk to people who have become now no longer reliant on those payday lenders because they're like, great, I've got a job. I know that I'm going to be able to bounce jobs a lot and like historically, I'd have to go to these guys. Now I can get a job as quickly as possible. It's so essential to talk to and more importantly, listen to the individuals who are on the ground because in doing so, you understand where the friction is and that allows you to build product. So now I can give some very simple examples like one of the big things that we did is train our systems to ensure that when individuals are uploading documents tied to hiring and onboarding, it self-corrects in real time. Basically letting them know, hey, you've uploaded the wrong document, hey, this document is out of date, hey, this document is blurry, this document is expired, all of which are rules that we've put into place and it sounds very simple, but if someone is in a rush, if they're between jobs, they need to pick up their kids and they're like, they might be on their phone, they're like, okay, I need to get this ASAP and they'll just maybe upload a picture of their dog instead of their driver's license and under the old systems, that would just get submitted and that would sit somewhere in the bottom of a pile and a week later, someone sent them an email saying, hey, please re-upload it and in that week's time, they've been waiting desperately trying to check if they have the job. They don't know that they've not submitted the right thing. So it's when you talk to people and understand where their lives are and what the pain is, then I think that's when you can see where there's real use cases for AI to improve those lives. It's so interesting because in eliminating human error, you are giving blue collar workers back a bit of their humanity. They have more time to kind of spend with their family instead of worrying about uploading documents and being compliant and they're less susceptible to these predatory payday lending practices and it's really interesting. If you take a first principles approach to something like hiring and you go through some of these hiring flows and you see once again, there's maybe 12, 13, 14 forms, it sounds very simple, but there's no reason why you have to manually re-enter the same 8, 10 data points 12 times in a row and if you get one number wrong on your personal number or on your email or your SN, you then have to go and redo it two weeks later. We have tools in place that can take the information as you present it and use it to help you out downstream of that and just crunch that time that you spend filling out the application and do it in a way that once again is way more compliant because it's checking against different sources of truth. It's checking the authenticity of things. To me, this is where AI can be really beneficial because this is sort of, it's very administrative. It's very bureaucratic. It's the sort of things that no one really enjoys doing and I'd rather that we take away that pain from workers so that they can, to your point, focus on spending time with their families or getting into work sooner and getting trained up sooner and getting excited by the role. Talk about excited. I am galvanized and it's clear this technology has been revolutionary. We'll continue to be so thank you for all the work you're doing at First Work. Thank you. And then in the American work sector, writ large, to wrap us up here, we'd love to finish off with what we call the bright side blitz. So a couple of rapid fire questions here. Okay, okay. If you're game. I'm ready for it. Let's take it away. All right, Violet, kick us off. So First Work is all about speed, hiring in minutes, not weeks. So in your day to day life, Ardon, what is something that you think should actually take a little bit longer? It's a very good question. I think I'm spending way too much time on the road right now. I think I'm spending a lot of time in meetings, a lot of time with clients and prospects. I think every time I spend time with family, friends and loved ones, I'm like, I should spend more time in this. And then I run off and get on another flight. But I think as a society writ large, I think, you know, people are getting very focused on productivity. And I think that's really important. But I think it's, it's important to also think about what that productivity gives back to us, which is the ability to spend time with the people who care about, yeah, we talked about that just for the last few minutes. But I think that that really is one of the things that like getting away from the drudgery of bureaucracy so you can live your days doing things that are important to you is I think one of the most important things that technology can do. Love it. And since we're friends, maybe we can consider this quality time here, not a business meeting. Quality time indeed. Yeah. In the studio. Yeah. Well, wonderful. And, and as you mentioned too, before you've lived a number of years in Singapore, a number of months in, in Tokyo, if I remember correctly. Dubai, London. Dubai, London. Worldly man. Anyway, what is it you think that's specific and unique to American AI that will, and I'll use this word, allow us to dominate in the AI race? It's a great question. And I think it boils back to what you said earlier on, right, about the ecosystem and everything about the country at large, allowing individuals and organizations to go into real problems and solve those problems. It sounds right. But like there's parts of the world where that go to market motion is highly restricted. There's lots and lots of rules and regulations on what sort of organization can engage with what sort of other organization. There's room for certain categories of hardware player to succeed if they have the right support. There's room for certain kinds of small software players to succeed if they have the right support. But I think America is the only country in the world where you've had like exceptional quality software built at scale because it's a market that you can go into and have a conversation about solving problems and present a solution and people will look at that solution. And it's that applicability of real technology to real problems that means that you're building real solutions. And I think parts of the world where maybe that process flow is not clear and it's, you know, you can't build real solutions. You end up with a lot of performative technology that doesn't or solutionism that doesn't solve real problems. And because it's not solving real problems, you're not building real companies. Software that dominates. There we go. Couldn't have said it better myself. We'll have to have it. Anyway, thank you, Vardhan, for joining us today. We share your optimism about AI here in America and appreciate all the work you're doing to really revolutionize the American worker. And it was great to have you on. Thank you so much. It's a big privilege to get to share all the awesome work that first work is doing. Thanks for having me. It's been it's been such a treat. And thanks for listening to this installment of Working Intelligence, the AI optimism project. See you next time.