One-line solution summary:
SIID™ Technologies harnesses the intuitive power of machine learning to mitigate biases within systems and institutions.
Pitch your solution.
HR departments are well aware that unconscious biases exist, but they don’t have a way to address it until it’s too late - companies risk both costly lawsuits and lasting reputational damage.
SIID™ Technologies applies machine learning and artificial intelligence to help organizations and professionals evaluate, uncover, and correct the influence of unconscious human biases on decision-making and communication.
Applied within a collaborative digital environment on a global scale, companies can gain a deeper understanding of their workforce sentiment and culture. This enables them to be strategic and intentional about the resources and training that they need either within regions or across departments.
What specific problem are you solving?
According to a study by Impact Project, the U.S. spends $8 billion annually on DEI Training, and the annual cost of workplace bias is projected at $64 billion, which doesn’t include legal costs for lawsuits due to unlawful behavior.
What goes unasked is, how do HR teams know where to focus their budget? Where are there weaknesses in programming? Investing in facilitators and training with little strategic aim, focus, or method to measure outcomes results in performative DEI programming which can damage hiring, retention, communication, and decision-making.
While conventional diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives focus on employee engagement and belonging, companies find themselves ill-prepared to mitigate challenges resulting from 2020’s global health crisis, political uprising and racial unrest. SIID Technologies is well-positioned to help companies mitigate these challenges.
A second Impact Group study evaluated 3,570 full-time respondents with white-collar occupations, consisting of men, women, African Americans, Caucasians, Asians, and Hispanics between the ages of 21 and 65 with at least a bachelor’s degree. Of those who reported experiencing workplace bias, 33% felt alienated, 34% withheld ideas and solutions and 80% would not refer people to their employer. SIID Technologies would provide the reporting platform to consistently measure, analyze, mitigate, and report these events.
What is your solution?
SIID™ Technologies is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) accessible by web and available as a plugin, bot and crawler. The solution helps HR departments uncover the influence of human biases in internal and external communication, monitor workplace culture, mitigate risk and promote mindfulness.
At an individual level, SIID™ Technologies helps professionals identify their own bias by flagging problematic language within written messages such as emails, social posts, and blogs, so they can communicate with more understanding and empathy.
The prototype, a Natural Language Processor (NLP), will serve as the baseline algorithm for all SIID™ future solutions and can be deployed into collaborative workspaces such as Slack, Teams, Discord and across social media platforms.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
SIID™ Technologies offers a model that will transform the workplace in ways that change the environment for historically underserved groups - removing the burden off of Black, Brown, Asian and Indigenous employees, whose secondary, unwritten job is often serving in a DEI or ERG capacity. This improves equity in powerful ways to the overall culture from hiring, pay, mentor and sponsor opportunities, as well as retention.
It achieves this by educating and engaging the enterprise-level DEI teams, the ever-expanding global workforce, as well as individual employees as they work to further uncover biases and bridge gaps in fairness.
- SIID™ Technologies enables HR departments, who have limited budgets and staff, to use artificial intelligence to more effectively implement DEI initiatives that measurably transform culture. This is critical as it gives leaders a powerful resource that reaches everyone - and removes over reliance on underrepresented employees.
- With remote work accelerating to include more international employees, SIID™ Technologies enables companies to collaborate in a mindful way that crosses different countries, languages, and cultures. Very few of the current technologies are addressing how 70% of employees worldwide are navigating the growing diversity within their teams and organization.
- Reaching and educating individual professionals, who are unaware of their own biases, results in creating a workforce that is more empathic. SIID™ Technologies can identify needed changes in language, sentiment, and mindsets in a consistent manner that empowers people to change and grow.
As part of our development process, we are seeking partner employers (universities, corporations, NGOs) to test SIID™ Technologies. We want to expand the contexts in which implicit biases show up in day-to-day team communication. With deeper insights, we can evolve the solution and help companies extend their DEI efforts to their digital workforce.
Which dimension of the Digital Workforce Challenge does your solution most closely address?
Reduce inequalities in the digital workforce for historically underserved groups through improved hiring and retention practices, skills assessments, training, and employer education and engagementExplain how the problem you are addressing, the solution you have designed, and the population you are serving align with the Challenge.
Companies everywhere are seeing the benefits of a more connected global workforce, but yet a trend report by Globalization Partners, showed a 25% increase in gender-based harassment during the 2020 COVID driven digital transformation, a 10% increase in race- and ethnicity-based hostility, and a 23% increased in age-based harassment or hostility.
SIID™ Technologies helps companies shape their digital workforce culture by promoting mindful, inclusive practices and bridging the gaps in fairness.
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Minneapolis, MN, USAIs your solution already being implemented in one or more of the following ServiceNow locations (Australia/New Zealand, Canada, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Israel, Japan, the Netherlands, Singapore, the United Kingdom, United States), or are you planning to expand your solution to one or more of these countries?
I am planning to expand my solution to one or more of these ServiceNow locations
Please provide an overview of your expansion plans. What is the market opportunity for your business or product here?
Global Workplace Analytics believes that 25-30% of the workforce will be working remotely by 2021. Additionally Software as a Service solutions like SIID™ Technologies are the dominant mode of cloud computing and will continue to grow, consuming nearly 60% of cloud spending by the end of 2021. To immediately address the needs of today’s digital workforce, we plan to focus on the following go-to-market modalities and expansion strategies:
Private Consulting
Channel Partners
Direct-to-Consumer
What is your solution’s stage of development?
Prototype: A venture or organization building and testing its product, service, or business model.Explain why you selected this stage of development for your solution.
SIID™ Technologies is a pre-seed, pre-revenue, early-stage startup. We are currently training the machine learning model for our Ai, which will also serve as the baseline algorithm for future solutions. We have tested the current version in a Slack environment. Our next step is the Pilot phase in which we will use expanded datasets to aggregate current language usage in real time environments.
Who is the Team Lead for your solution?
Eri O’Diah, SIID™ Technologies, Founder
Do you qualify for and would you like to be considered for the ServiceNow US Racial Equity Prize? If you select Yes, explain how you are qualified for the prize in the additional question that appears.
Yes, I wish to apply for this prize
Explain how you are qualified for this prize. How will your team use the ServiceNow Digital Equity Prize to advance your solution?
SIID™ Technologies is taking an inclusive human-centered approach to the design and application of Fairness AI. The solution is designed with and for underserved communities. Receiving the ServiceNow Equity Prize will allow us the much-needed funds to further research, development, and testing of the solution.
Which of the following categories best describes your solution?
A new application of an existing technologyWhat makes your solution innovative?
SIID™ Technologies leverages the intuitive power of artificial intelligence to uncover and correct the influence of unconscious human biases on decision-making and communication.
Describe the core technology that powers your solution.
SIID™ Technologies is a Natural Language Processor (NLP).
NLP have been built with high level accuracy that identify bias in text but, until now, they have not been used for real time analysis. Our product will be able to detect, correct, and educate users as content is being written and before publishing, thus increasing awareness around equity, diversity, inclusivity in the workforce and ultimately reduces the anxiety around the facilitation of difficult DEI discussions.
Provide evidence that this technology works. Please cite your sources.
Direct competitors like Grammarly and Textio are already using AI to help users learn how to improve their writing and remove gender bias from messages. Additionally, tech giants like Google, IBM, and Accenture are leveraging AI to identify algorithmic bias or gaps in data. SIID™ Technologies is using the same AI technology but apply it differently to mitigate biases within systems and institutions.
Please select the technologies currently used in your solution:
Does this technology introduce any risks? How are you addressing or mitigating these risks in your solution?
There are concerns that SiID Technology may infringe upon freedom of speech and/or user privacy. But the solution simply monitors the overarching sentiment of conversations, rather than recording conversation or linking conversations to individual users.
Select the key characteristics of your target population.
In which countries do you currently operate?
In which countries will you be operating within the next year?
How many people does your solution currently serve? How many will it serve in one year? In five years?
SIID™ Technologies is a pre-seed, pre-revenue, early-stage startup. We are currently training the machine learning model for our Ai, which will also serve as the baseline algorithm for all future solutions. We have tested the current version in a Slack environment. Our next step is the pilot phase in which we want to expand upon our datasets by aggregating current language usage in real time environments.
With channel partnerships as one of our modalities to market, SIID™ has the opportunity to serve an available market of 12 million Slack users, and 75 million Microsoft Team users.
What are your impact goals for the next year and the next five years, and -- importantly -- how will you achieve them?
N/A
How are you measuring your progress toward your impact goals?
N/A
What type of organization is your solution team?
For-profit, including B-Corp or similar models
How many people work on your solution team?
Our team consists of 1 full-time and 3 part-time staff as well as 8 advisors.
How long have you been working on your solution?
We have been working on SIID™ Technologies for 2 years, since the startup was established in the fall of 2019.
How are you and your team well-positioned to deliver this solution?
SIID™ Technologies is a diverse team with expertise in the area of machine learning, Ai ethics, diversity, equity and inclusive training, product management, marketing and advertising.
Our advising CTO, is a Fellow and affiliate of Stanford University where she is conducting research on Natural Language Processing. Her research seeks to reduce bias in GPT-3s, which are generative pre-trained autoregressive language models that use deep learning to produce human-like text.
What is your approach to building a diverse, equitable, and inclusive leadership team?
SIID™ Technologies is an equal employment opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment and will not be discriminated against on the basis of race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, disability, age, genetic information, veteran status, ancestry, or national or ethnic origin.
We are committed to the advancement of underrepresented and historically excluded groups in the technology space and give preference in our recruiting and hiring practices to qualified applicants who identify as members of these groups.
Do you primarily provide products or services directly to individuals, to other organizations, or to the government?
Organizations (B2B)Why are you applying to the 2021 Digital Workforce Challenge?
Given our target market and stakeholders, as well as our geographical location, we believe we are well positioned to qualify for the $50K U.S. Racial Equity Prize and have the opportunity to win the 2021 Digital Workforce Challenge.
Lack of funding, an expert network, and mentorship have all been barriers for us. Additionally, if selected, SIID™ Technologies will have access to potential partners and initial customers through MiT’s Media Lab and other programming.
In which of the following areas do you most need partners or support?
Please explain in more detail here.
We most need support establishing technical partnerships with expert technologists, data scientists, and business development to expand our client base.
What organizations would you like to partner with, and how would you like to partner with them?
Ultimately, we would like to develop a research and technical partnership with academic institutions who are leaders in the AI space, like MIT on our NSF SBIR/STTR Grant proposal.
Additionally, we hope to gain support developing B2B channel partnerships with collaborative work technology companies like Slack, Microsoft Teams as well as other relevant solutions for marketing, content development, and social media platforms.
Solution Team
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Eri O'Diah Founder, SIID™ Technologies
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Solution Name:
SIID™ Technologies