And were there any aha or epiphany moments along the way as your career evolved?

I mean, there are always sort of interesting moments, right, that change how you see your work, the trajectory of your work.

You know, before I came to cover AI in 2017, 2018, I was already an investigative reporter, right? I looked for systemic problems in the world and to report on them.

And the work has gotten me to... you know, document, uh, surrogacy when you pay a woman to have a baby for you in the United States, there are loads of problems with that.

I went to Pakistan to, uh, report on an alleged gang rape, um, and what happens in a culture, uh, that tries to silence women.

Um, that actually did get me, um, uh, the, the Emmy win.

Um, and, um, yeah.

but

Mm

... where companies have to register and say, like, "We use this AI tool or not." We just know this from surveys and sometimes me calling companies.

Um, so I know that they use AI.

So you have to think about, like, the beginning of the hiring process, you often have thousands of people applying for a job, right? We call this, like, sort of a big funnel, and, uh, some companies, you know, this is, um, a couple years old, but I talked to Google, they get over 3 million applications.

IBM gets 5 million, over 5 million applications a year.

So it's a lot of resumes that come into this funnel.

So what we now see is, like, um, a lot of companies, and usually large companies, a lot of Fortune 500s, uh, use AI to reject people, to sort of cull the herd of all these applicants.

[laughing]

So the problem is technology has created th- this problem, and therefore, we need more technology to solve the problem, which is where the AI comes in.

Yes.

Uh, you know, it seems sometimes that we believe technology will always solve our problems.

So I took this deep dive.

I went down the rabbit hole into, uh, AI in the workplace, and I uncovered that it's pretty ubiquitous, actually, already, if we realize it or not.

I found, um, different machine learning and AI tools all throughout what, uh, folks call the employee life cycle.

So we see this, we see a lot of AI tools in hiring.

Mm-hmm.

How would you describe that?

Yeah.

I mean, it's hard to tally, right, because, you know, no company has to tell a government regulator.

We don't have, like, official statistics or anything.

But we have surveys, and we have companies that sort of self-disclose, and I've talked to a lot of companies while I was writing the book.

So I talked to all of the...

You know, I think the first, uh, point that I think a lot of job seekers will, uh, sort of encounter AI if they... you know, it's not clear if they will sort of understand that they're encountering AI.

... what do they, what do they do with the- that data?

How would you describe that?

Yeah.

I mean, it's hard to tally, right? Because, you know, no company has to tell a government regulator.

We don't have, like, official statistics or anything.

But we have surveys, and we have companies that sort of self-disclose, and I've talked to a lot of companies while I was writing the book.

So, I talked to all of the...

You know, I think the first, uh, point that I think a lot of job seekers will, uh, sort of encounter AI if they...

... what do they, what do they do with the, that data?