FutureFit AI

The Problem: Layoffs suck for everyone.

Research shows layoffs already have a negative impact on those let go, surviving workers, the company, and the community - AI will only exasperate its frequency, intensity, and complexity.

Our Solution: AI-powered Reskilling & Outskilling.

An AI engine trained on one of the world's largest data sets of automation risk, job demand, skills, and learning to help those impacted discover their talents & skills, map their career path, and get access to a personalized menu of supports (e.g. skills, coaching, interview preparation, financial planning) and a budget to pursue and secure their next opportunity.

This is not an idea. With over $1M in partnerships secured in 2020 including Fortune 1000 companies and national governments on 3 continents, FutureFit AI is one of the most holistic, scalable, and intelligent solutions poised to help people recover from COVID’s impact on employment and deal with future disruptions.ddd 

Despite endless headlines about automation and jobs, the majority of solutions default to attempted skill development often through delivery of online content. What this approach misunderstands is that skills are only one piece in a much larger puzzle and the real challenge is in helping people make full and successful transitions from where they are to a better next career stage 

When it comes to layoffs specifically, the impact on people is staggering according to researchers: only 40% finding work at equal or higher pay, fully 20% still unemployed after a year, still earning 20% less than peers 20 years later, 83% higher chance of developing a new health condition, and 6x more likely to commit a violent act.

The numbers don't tell a much better story for companies either: neutral to negative impact on stock price, declines in profitability,  2x likelihood of filing for bankruptcy, 1% downsizing leading to 31% increase in voluntary turnover with survivors experiencing 41% decline in job satisfaction / 36% decline in organizational commitment / 20% decline in job performance.

In the US alone, over 1M people are laid off annually which will only grow with increasing adoption of automation.

Imagine having very own AI-powered Career Assistant that guides you through every stage of your transition all the way through you reaching your next destination just like a Google Maps for your Career:

1. 360 Profile Analysis ('Locating' You)

2. Labour Market Intelligence ('Mapping' the World of Opportunity): 

3. Virtual Career Coach (Human Guidance)

4. Career Matches (Recommending 'Destinations')

5. Personalized Pathway Mapping: 

6. Access to Marketplace of Opportunities & Supports

Our long-term vision is to support every person on the planet through critical career transitions - from new grads to veterans to previously incarcerated to refugees/immigrants to returning mothers/retirees to the unemployed - with a personalized AI Career Assistant.

Our immediate laser sharp focus is on those impacted by layoffs, particularly those in careers at high risk of automation and being let go due to business transformation and technological adoption. This often means marginalized populations - those in lower income brackets, with diverse backgrounds, and more barriers to access opportunity in the marketplace.

All of our work is done with those we serve at the centre. We began with interviewing over 1,000 people going through career transitions to understand their experiences, emotions, aspirations, and challenges navigating a fast changing world of work.

Their input, insights, and feedback has helped developed both the core elements of our model as well as specific product features and functionality. Their voice continues to be central to the ongoing development and growth of our solution.

Our solution addresses 3 critical common threads in what we consistently hear from them: 1) feeling shame (removing taboo) 2) being paralyzed (intelligence) and 3) getting overwhelmed (personalization+coach)

FutureFit AI is rooted in the challenge context described by Good Jobs Challenge and directly addresses two of the three highlighted solutions:

1. Support workers to access living wages and financial security in order to prepare, withstand, and recover from economic shocks by unlocking new personalized budgets and providing personalized supports during career transitions 

2. Equip workers with technological and digital literacy as well as the durable skills needed to stay apace with the changing job market and economic downturns by connecting workers to a marketplace of 5,000+ skill development opportunities from some of the world’s leading providers like edX and FutureLearn

FutureFit AI uniquely combines the power of deep data with personalized, human-supported guidance for workers in transition:

1. Data-deep, AI-first: With 300M+ resumes/CVs of real people's careers as real-time labour market information based on millions of job postings being scanned, our data is one of the most comprehensive and granular sets in the space globally mapping 200+ countries and territories, 7M+ companies, 30,000+ education institutions and their programs / courses, 3,000+ occupations, 30,000+ skills, 140+ industries, and more. 

2. End-to-end Transition Support: As outlined earlier, this is the real and far more complex challenge of the automation era - not simply putting people through yet another training course. Our solution is focused in supporting the person through the entire transition, pulling in the right mix of AI-driven intelligence, human guidance, and a marketplace of supports and services.

3. Existing Budget Line, Re-purposed for Transformative Purpose: One of the best ways to have transformative impact at scale is to disrupt an existing budget line rather than trying to create a new one. We have identified just such an opportunity in the hundreds of millions of dollars companies already spend on layoffs / outplacement and are focused on transforming how they are used to improve people's lives.

4. Benefits for All Stakeholders: Our model not only delivers outcomes for the beneficiaries but improves brand and business results and reduces risks for the business while driving significant benefits and efficiencies for governments and communities.

Machine Learning Natural Language Processing techniques specifically customized for career transitions leveraging a database of over 300M+ resumes/CVs as well as real-time labour market information based on millions of job postings being scanned to map personalized pathways for those impacted by layoffs

https://youtu.be/KpSQHYSgZis

Our Theory of Change, at its core, is both intuitive and research-backed: 

Problem Growth Trajectory: More AI + automation --> more jobs transformed --> more layoffs (which already suck) --> more people needing to make a transition --> more of those transitions being more complex (can no longer just apply to same job thanks to automation) --> current systems of work & learning set up support people at stable points in time not in transition

Intervention Impact Logic: 

• Activities: Workers impacted by layoffs use the FutureFit AI platform, powered by AI and guided by human coaches, to discover and pursue their next career opportunity.

• Outputs: Impacted workers are provided with personalized and holistic transition services including profile analysis, pathway mapping, personalized work opportunity recommendations, as well as access to a marketplace of additional supports and services.

• Short-term Outcomes: Increase in 

• Long-term Outcomes:

Evidence Supporting Links:

1. Activities-to-Outputs: We are able to track every user's journey and show their participation leads directly to them engaging with the intelligence, supports, and resources provided through our solution.

2. Outputs-to-STOutcomes: Supported by Harvard research among others

3. STOutcomes-to-LTOutcomes: While it is still to early for us to prove this at scale, our early results point to a direct linkage between the alternatives in public support systems workers would rely on as well as negative financial, physical, and mental impacts if they did not have access to the supports provided to them through FutureFit AI.

Current No.: 10,000

Serving a year from now: 500,000
Serving 5 years from now: 2,500,000

1. 2.5M Layoffs Transformed: We believe there is a significant opportunity in the next five years to fundamentally transform the public and personal narrative on layoffs - from one of deep, hidden shame towards 'the best things that ever happened to me' by helping 2.5M people make proud and successful transitions and then tell their stories to the world.

2. Global Leader: We already have presence on 3 continents and have had significant demand from governments and companies globally which we aim to serve by building up the necessary infrastructure to support application of our solution across various geographies, cultures, and contexts

3. Best-in-Class Impact: We aim to be rigorous in capturing and tracking the impact of our interventions and continuously updating our model and the mix of supports provided based on those results. Following Year 2, we will be investing in an independent Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) of our solution towards achieving this goal.

4. Scaling Beyond Ourselves: We began this journey with a clear understanding that we would never achieve maximum by only trying to scale our own organization. We already have a strategy in place to scale the impact of our work by sharing our core algorithms and AI models with impact-driven organizations who would customized and localize them for their contexts and countries as well as by offering our technology platform to public employment service organization at a significant discount.

Key Barrier for Next Year: Catch-22 Market Dynamics - Just like an immigrant who arrives in a new country and is asked for local experience to get a job, large enterprises often ask for past experience before bringing new solutions onboard. Breaking through this barrier is our most significant challenge in the next year.

Key Barriers for the Next Five Years:

• Financial: Drive growth to enable Series A and Series B raises in next 5 years to provide the necessary capital to take on the challenge at global scale

• Technical: Further develop Career Match Score, Pathway Success Probability Score, and Next Step Recommendation algorithms to improve accuracy and enable dynamic contextualization to any geography, language, and occupation

• Cultural: Take on the shame-driven narrative around layoffs in the public discourse with marketing campaigns where people tell stories of their successful transitions

• Market: Build API integrations with point solution provides to allow for personalization of supports to the individual and seamless tracking of each journey across stages

• Financial: We are growing our revenues even despite COVID with investor interest to accelerate our work through a Series A raise in the next 6 months

• Technical: We will grow our technical teams by bringing additional data engineers and data scientists onboard to help improve our algorithms

• Cultural: We are working with global partners to address the stigma around layoffs through publications and public campaigns

• Market: Our Marketplace model will allow us to incentivize learning and training partners to be more amenable to API integrations driving more flexibility and choice for the end user

Full-Time: 10

Our team unique combines a deep understanding of the enterprise and government contexts in this space (use cases, tech stack, spend, decision makers, etc) with both technology and data expertise - each a necessary but alone insufficient piece of the triangular puzzle to solve this complex challenge at scale.

World Economic Forum - strategic partner on Reskilling Revolution Platform

Largest financial institution in Canada - using FutureFit AI as a national upskilling and reskilling platform to support recent grads and young workers impacted by COVID

Hospitality and Tourism Industry Association - using FutureFit AI to help workers laid off due to COVID transition to their next opportunity

UK government - using FuturFit AI to help workers at highest risk of automation

Fortune 100 company - using FutureFit AI to help their exiting workers find what’s next

UAE government - using FutureFit AI as national future jobs & skills pathway mapping platform

OECD - FuturFit AI used to map career pathways for youth based on automation

MIT - Sandy Pentland and Morgan Frank using FutureFit AI data for research on employment transitions in US and Australia.

We sell SaaS licenses to enterprises, governments, and agencies.

The customer invests a certain budget per person, a portion of which goes to cover our licenses with the balance converted into credits that the individual can use to access additional services and supports through our marketplace. These are dollars the individual would not have had any access to previously.

Our SaaS licensing model already produces both positive cash flows and margins for our business with the unit economics only improving as we scale.

Planned investment capital will only help to accelerate our growth.

COVID has only magnified the need for our platform to help workers in transition.

We are applying to Solve to access a network of private and impact sector partners keen on using AI technology to address employment and skill issues at scale.

Specifically, we would like to work with The Emerson Collective, McGovern Foundation, GM, and MIT Work of the Future Initiative, Australian Government, and IDB to scale our work across geographies and sectors.

We would also like to work with the Solve team in amplifying our message around removing the stigma associated with layoffs through media and thought leadership channels.

Specifically, we would like to work with The Emerson Collective, McGovern Foundation, GM, and MIT Work of the Future Initiative, Australian Government, and IDB to scale our work across geographies and sectors.

We would specifically use The GM Prize and expertise from the GM team to develop a rapid reskilling and outskilling solution for the automotive sector powered by our platform. Our vast datasets of over 300M resume and millions of job postings as well as automation will allow us to dynamically map jobs most at risk, identify critical skill pathways to good future jobs, and integrate personalized assessments and gap analysis.

With GM’s leadership, this could benefit automotive workers in the US and around the world to proactively pursue pathways that will help them reskill and achieve financial security while creating room for the industry to continue its fast-paced transformation and at the same time taking care of its workers whose jobs will be impacted.

FutureFit AI is squarely rooted in using the power of big data to benefit humanity. Built on data from over 350M resumes as well as millions of real-time job postings and thousands of learning opportunities, FutureFit is using one of the most comprehensive datasets on jobs, skills, and learning to build an AI-powered GPS for your Career to help people around the world navigation the impacts of disruptions such as automation, COVID, and layoffs.

FutureFit AI's work has been recognized by World Economic Forum, US and UK Governments, as well as by Google AI as one of the top 1% solutions globally using the power of AI to address global humanity challenges.

We will use the AI for Humanity Prize to specifically accelerate our Natural Language Processing algorithms to recommend personalized career pathways that can dynamically localized to the person's location, industry, job, and skills - a critical component in achieving the vision of a global GPS for your Career.

FutureFit AI is a revenue-generating, cash-flow-positive, purpose-driven, for-profit venture addressing one of the most significant challenges impacting humanity in the 21st century as well as immediately as a key part of recovery from COVID: helping people navigate the new world of work particularly through layoffs and unemployment caused by disruptions such as COVID, automation, and more. 

FutureFit AI is also mature enough to be ready to provide the Future Planet Capital team with the required materials and documentation to review for potential investment.

We will use the prize to specifically scale our work in helping marginalized communities living in regions where they are most significantly impacted by both COVID-related unemployment as well as accelerating impacts of climate change. We can target and accelerate funding deployment through our AI-powered reskilling platform given our experience of having worked with both national governments and global companies.