Introduction

Hi, everybody. My name is Alexandra Wright. It's really good to be here. Thank you very much.

I'm going to talk about Able, and I'm going to talk specifically about building kind systems and ethical AI, so thanks for the segue, Mark.

Able is an on -demand skill work product.

I'm going to give you a demo. I'm going to talk about what's unique about Able in the recruitment tech space.

I'm going to talk about our progress now that we're um piloted and out on the market i'm going to talk about a symposium i went to at the house of commons last week um and i'm going to talk about some future plans that we've got um coming

Able as a Trust Layer for On‑Demand Hiring

up and then i'm going to end with a call to action okay so um uber airbnb they uh they came about and they required a significant change in behaviors in terms of what they were asking of the people to use their product.

It was, you know, it became safe suddenly to get in a stranger's car using Uber. It became safe suddenly to go into somebody's house using Airbnb.

They created this trust layer that didn't exist before. And that is what Able is.

We are a trust layer for, to enable you to hire anybody on the open market, so long as they're on Able. We do the right to work checks, we gather their details we help them record video bios and we take the recruitment of somebody for

an on -demand skill from days hours maybe but probably days sometimes even weeks and longer term if it's got a if it's a more regulated sector to literally minutes you can just hire and book somebody in the same way that you can book an uber or book somewhere to stay with airbnb

what makes us unique compared to uber and airbnb for example is that we are values based at able our values are be good be kind be fair we have low autonomy agents and those agents are instructed to behave in this way we talk about our values when we recruit people onto the platform and and our partners that use the platform and i'm going to use these values to talk about

this symposium that i was at with the house of commons on the the future of work basically and and how important being kind is going to be in our future.

Early partners and public-sector support

I've got all these fantastic logos down the bottom.

We've just started a partnership with Local London Work Connections, which is part of the UK -wide Connect to Work programme that's come out of the government.

It's almost half a billion pounds is going in to try and address some of the problems that came out in the Get Britain working paper, because we've got a workforce crisis, we've got a skills crisis, we've got a health crisis that is leading to a huge amount of economic inactivity.

So ABLE is helping nine East London boroughs with helping people get back to work using our platform.

We're part of the UK Innovate programme because we are high growth, high potential. That's part of the Department of Business and Trade and we're supported by the Mayor of London. And so it's really great to have this sort of level of support from the government, particularly because we are, as I've mentioned, values based.

Product Demo: Ethical AI–Assisted Booking

So I'm going to do a move into a demo now. OK, so tell me about yourself and what gig you need filling.

so you say, I am looking for a bartender, okay. This is part of ethical AI, so everything has to be confirmed by the user, so there's no assumptions.

What kind of skills or requirements? So you go into a bit more detail here and ask what you...

And as we grow, this vector and semantic search will become so intelligent um so instead of you know asking you know to the open market oh i'm looking for a bartender tomorrow that might know about whiskey or i'm looking for a waitress that might know about japanese food we're going to have a um a searchable database of resources

that will be able to match that need to some people with that skill instantly um we've obviously got we've got london minimum wages built right in but we've got a um an indicator of how much you should should be paying for the different skills.

We've also got remote work capability coming soon. And it's important to say we're launching with hospitality and events, and I'll talk a little bit about why we're doing that soon, but ABLE is skill agnostic.

So zero ABLE fee is going to give you free ABLE fees, so you can use that and share it with people in your network.

Ethical AI in action: human-in-the-loop review

Okay, so what's happening now is we're called Ethical AI in Action. So if we go to the admin portal, I can show you.

1So until we get really good and we're at a bigger scale, every single search is reviewed by a human. So we've got three workers that come through.

all of them have this bartender skill all of them seem to be in the right area so because we're training the ai we have this human in the loop process obviously just adds a little bit of time to um to our to our launch and to the initial searches but it does mean that we are um they are much safer um and obviously adds a little time but when you normally do a search

to hire somebody for a bartender or whatever job it's never come this quickly even with a human in the loop process so we've got three available workers in London for the gig tomorrow night

Fair matching: pseudonymization and bias-aware design

we've got so we've got pseudonymized matching pseudonym pseudonymized matching again this is part of ethical AI so we've taken you know if there's no star ratings either there's indications that people, non -white workers, have a 9 % decrease in their earnings through star ratings. We don't add names at this stage.

When you click on the worker here, you do get to see their name, and she hasn't done her video yet. She's not right -to -work verified yet,

but this takes time, but you can see her skill profile here. She's good at customer service, problem -solving, organisation.

She knows how to use a corkscrew. through. In time, the managers, we have these feedback reviews at the end of each shift.

Here's another one. Let's show you. I think Seb's got a video, so we can just watch that.

Hi, I'm Seb. I'm a hospitality bar worker. I have watched skills in cocktails, bar running, stuff like this.

I'm a hard worker. I'd be happy to join your company.

okay and what's another thing about able as you say able sees all of you so um we are skill agnostic and you can add up to five different skills to able so you don't have to just be in hospitality there we've got i'll show you what other skills we've got um added already so say

Pricing, terms, and instant booking

we wanted to offer seb this job and able as well we're a cost leader we're coming in eight percent and that is um so 1 .5 percent is that stripes stripes fees we'll be building an an open banking API soon, so our fees are going to fall even lower. So you can see, yeah, right now Able Charge is 6 .5 % and Stripe Charge is 1 .5%.

So our competitors, and they obviously, they don't have this immediate booking process. You're looking at 15 minimum percent, if not 30 or 40. TaskRabbit is 50.

So say if I wanted to book Seb, you have this agreement that just talks through in a bit more detail the terms and conditions and just describes how what be good be fair be kind means and then you can tick that and bookseb okay

Market Context and Current Traction

i showed you the human in the loop so let me just talk about um generally the uk staffing market which is currently valued at 47 billion pounds um like i said our able ai is skill agnostic so it covers across um we've got videographers on there we've got tech um on

there we've just had an hr manager join um and so for a restaurant or a care home where we haven't got health care workers on there yet i'll talk about that in a minute um if they're running 20 shifts a week using temporary staffing platforms or agencies which is very standard for a lot of these companies then you're looking at a saving of 40 000 pounds a year now 85 of employers are

now making skills -based hires so what qualifications you have what your experience is is less important compared to what skills do you have and those are the hard skills and those employability skills as well like organization leadership and what have you when you look at the numbers in terms of the

scale of this economy we're looking at probably at least one in six workers in the uk working under some kind of on -demand freelance agency type work in the us 50 of the workforce is now freelance so So this is a global phenomenon. And this economy is predicted to grow to $2 trillion by 2034.

So I'm just going to give you a little... I'm just going to show you... Okay, here.

User growth, skills coverage, and rates so far

So this is who we currently have. We've got 232 users in our system so far. We've got 44 active gig folios. That's with 73 skills listed.

so you can see in Enfield we've got events assistant bartender kitchen assistant down here in Essex we've got a general worker we've got four of those I believe kitchen porter videographer there and so we've also you can see we've got tech and digital creative and media so that's what we've got here a marketing professional in Clapham a drummer in Twickenham trades and

professionals let's see oh profile and progress so anyway you can see as we're starting to grow We've also got some profiles registered in Nottingham, Manchester, Cardiff, Dakar, and Malawi. So it's nice to see us growing globally. But we are technically only being promoted in London.

The median hourly rate that we have at the moment is £15 an hour. And with hospitality, it's between £12 and £17. And with creative and tech, it's between £15 and £100. We've got somebody that worked for Stormzy, actually, in the creative and tech space.

What's really nice to see is that although we launch in hospitality and events, as I have said, we're skill agnostic. so it's been great to see people add their skills outside of hospitality and in fact the first placement that we made was for a videographer which um i mean i see that those skills is

Why Kindness and Ethics Matter in the Future of Work

hospitality adjacent but anyway okay so why does being kind and ethical matter now more than ever

we've got nine million um people out of work economically inactive in the uk at the moment and 2 .8 million of those almost a third are economically inactive due to ill health this This is costing the UK economy £212 billion a year

through impact in healthcare and on the Department of Work and Pensions through benefits.

House of Commons symposium: key takeaways

So I was invited to this symposium at the House of Commons last week and I wanted to just share what I learned there because I think especially as people that we know about AI and we have this, there's a certain sort of,

there's noise around AI and this fear of the job losses that come with it. And I guess my key takeaway that I'm excited to share with you is that if well i already know that ethical ai is a growth strategy there's no doubt about it

it's been shown that if we build ethical ai then we there's a net gain in jobs but on top of that what about if we use ai to yeah definitely save time and and energy and money and bring about efficiencies but what about if we use that extra space that ai gives us to be kinder be more gentle

be healthier at work and that's what this symposium attended by multiple mps the deputy mayor um academics trade union business leaders that's what we were there to discuss you know what can businesses do what should we be expecting of employers um to make work and health um part of

Work, health, and the rising need for care roles

like in a very important conversation and there's a hidden mental health crisis because we know that there's there are issues in the workforce around the skills issues workforce issues health issues but particularly around mental health and behaviors behaviors and addiction one in 10 people

at least is suffering from some kind of behavioral addiction um and it's important to say that work good work leads to good health and they um and work is a driver of a recovery not not just an outcome so um trying to provide space for people to be healthy at work is um it's just more and more of an important conversation um and one that um i'm i was grateful to have and if anybody wants

wants to speak to me about their own workplace or their business how to make it a healthier business that's better prepared for supporting people that are recovering from health issues then i'd be really happy to to share more about what i've learned and i think more than anything

that what we what i saw there was just how in the future there's going to be more space and more need for the caring roles the therapists and to to mark's point you know what is the most prolific use of the AI that we see, everyone's using it for therapy, there is a need there in our society for more care and support.

And people are filling it with AI, but we can also fill it with humans.

And then from emergency services to education to healthcare, we are understaffed right now. So these are high contact industries.

There's demand for people, basically, that's not just going to be suddenly backfilled by robots. That's not our future.

What’s Next: Credential Verification for Healthcare

okay so this is i'm really excited to talk about um what we're building now um so in the um health care which is the uk's largest sector right now um credential verification can take three to five months and one in five people change and don't accept have found a new position by the time

their credentials have been verified within the nhs on top of that the nhs spent three billion on staffing on agency staff last year and there is a there's a the government have said that they want to completely do away with that and over 700 nurses were investigated for qualifications forward and I'm sure it's not just nurses but there's issues around credential verification

A “resilience engine” built on verifiable credentials

basically it's taking far too long and it's there are inaccuracies out there so we're going to build a machine learning credential verification engine I'm calling it a resilience engine because it's It's kind of got three tiers where AI performs document analysis or AI agents contact and do verification through the issuing bodies.

Then there's an AI career coach, like a conversational rapper that talks to the person who has the credentials and ask them about their skills, their credentials, their work history, and then creates learning pathways or pathways to work for that particular local labor market.

Okay, and this is built on W3C verifiable credentials, which is the overlords have determined this is the sort of international credential standard for credentials.

Worker-owned credential wallets and faster onboarding

I'm just going to give you a little quick demo of what that looks like. So this would be, as an example, somebody's Nursing Midwifery Council registration.

They have it stored in this wallet along with their care certificate, and then they'd be able to add new credentials, and the AI agent or the automatic agent would be validating these credentials.

1And the really important thing about this is that the worker would then own this through this W3C verified credentials.

So instead of going to a business, going to a care trust or what have you and saying, verify me, instead they would already be verified.

They'd have their verifications stored cryptographically and you know that suddenly just makes the employment process so much faster so much

Conclusion and Call to Action

and so much fairer for the employee as well okay so it's a call to action there's my linkedin there and abel's website it takes five minutes to create a gig folio so tell your friends tell people in your network to get on able please we want you and like they say able sees all of you

it's fair work infrastructure you get 100 of your pay within 24 hours and there is no other platform that's doing that we're after businesses and white label partners zero able fee will give you zero able fees after that like i said it's eight percent but yeah please share the network

and we're we have an eis seed round closing in june 2026 so if you are interested in investing investing in future of work infrastructure for an ethical AI augmented skill -based economy then please talk to me afterwards oh and we're hiring a lead AI engineer as well so somebody that knows

about future of work blockchain verification ethical AI thank you very much everybody it's really nice to see you