Introduction

Hi, everyone. Thank you for the introduction, Niamh, and thanks, Leah. It's really great to be here. My name's Alexandra.

I'm the founder and CEO of Able. We use mostly agentic AI to create a new solution to book workers. Thank you.

What's exciting about the solution that I've developed is that we've already got backing from Innovate UK. UK. We're working with local London Work Connections, which is part of the government's Connect to Work programme, and we're supported by the Mayor of London, which just goes to show

that you can build in this space and still work closely with institutions who will support what you're doing.

I guess I'm going to just kind of throw it open to the floor.

The problem: understaffing in hospitality and events

Who here has been in a situation where they're out having a coffee, having a drink at an event like this, and you see that there is not enough staff available to help and support all the customers that are there.

Is that something that people are familiar with? Yeah, exactly.

So hospitality is where I've launched, though I'm going to show you that the platform is skill agnostic.

In events, up to 85 % of some events companies say that they run shifts understaffed or that 85 % of their shifts are run understaffed.

And generally across hospitality, that number tends to be around 60 or 70 percent so there's a problem with understaffing and the

Why traditional staffing workflows don’t fit temporary work

other side of that problem is overworking now current staffing solutions exist as job boards and agencies we're all familiar with posting a job on a job board or being an applicant more likely and applying for jobs and the other side of that is reviewing the applications and then making a choice and then seeing if they're available and then doing the checks this permanent hiring loop

Market context and the cost of redundancy

that has been applied to every single type of shift that gets filled now the staffing market is 620 billion dollars around the world but 15 % of that is permanent hiring and the job board process works for permanent hiring but

to apply that job board application review applicant that loop to temporary work which is 85 % of the market is perhaps a bit there's a bit of redundancy or a vast amount of redundancy that then sits in the system.

And obviously when you're trying to sell this to investors, and if they're only in the room I'd love to talk to you, it's very appealing to think about how much time and agentic AI solution could save a business.

Designing for workers, not just businesses

But actually I designed Able with the worker in mind first and foremost, and I see that there are workers out there that are spending vast amounts of time applying and vast amounts that's a time of being ghosted and the the the the end result of that is you know there's there's mental health implications um it's very demoralizing and it's you know it's is it is a there's a um a societal cost to to the um to those to those issues so now that i have introduced i'm also

Able’s approach: a “trust layer” for work

just going to say we say with trust tech that's the kind of you might have heard that expression before but it's a good way to describe able like i say uber made it uber was trust tech it made it safe, remember you were never allowed to get in mini cabs before Uber and then suddenly

you could trust these vehicles and Airbnb is a kind of trust tech because you were never going to go and just walk into someone's house and sleep there until Airbnb and in the same way you weren't going to employ someone off the street until Able.

So we're the trust layer for work, where are we and I'm going to do a demo.

Traction so far and pricing

We've got 556 profiles on the platform, we've got a load of qualifications logged which which is quite exciting, given I'll give you an update on why that's particularly relevant.

We've got four repeat customers and we're charging 8 % fees and 1 .5 % of that goes to Stripe. So Able itself is charging 6 .5 % fees.

You're not going to find a staffing platform that charges less than 15 % fees. Most of them charge 30 to 40 to 50%, even with agencies.

Speed, cost leadership, and ethical AI

So because we're building with a gen to KI, and on top of that, I'll show you, we're making the process so much faster. We're able to enter with a cost leadership price and on top of that we have values -based ethical AI architecture and I think that's really important to consider when you're building with AI.

I looked to the anthropic incident when they said to Donald Trump you know we're not going to be involved in your pentagon shenanigans and that was the inflection point at which anthropic began to supersede open AI and I think this is the point in time where we're going to be speaking the least about ethical and safe AI because it's only going to get more important for us as a society to bear in mind how ethical and safe are our AI systems and it's something that I've taken very seriously. I'll show you when we have the results what that looks like.

Verification, right-to-work checks, and healthcare expansion

Every worker on the platform we do their right to work checks, we check their ID so we know that they are validated to work in the UK and we are expanding into healthcare.

I had my first design session today with a global healthcare client.

This obviously, this is why I mentioned the qualifications so we're now going going to be verifying the credentials that people upload into the system and we're going to be putting them into a skills passport of sorts so here is the platform live i'm going to show you

Platform walkthrough and live demo

two things i'm going to do a little demo and i'm going to show you just a little interactive map built by claude of the workers across london and i'll show you that little qr code i'll put it back back up so you can join the app, please, as a manager or a freelancer.

Here we go. Okay, so this is what you see when you join Able. We're currently a web app, but we'll be going

live onto the iTunes and Play store soon. So you can be a freelancer or a manager, and we will have payroll roles soon. That was part of the deal of working with the government.

but you can add up to five skills in your gig folio but I'm going to just do you I'm going to show you how quick it is to hire somebody on the platform

does anybody have a particular we're in hospitality events so event steward or bartender anybody have a particular preference

for who what roles you'd like to see okay I'll have a look for okay I'm going to look for server which I think is a

I think that's what we've called the more like gender neutral term but this is going to be an interesting test for my platform to see because people join as waiters

and waitresses and so let's see what happens i would like to hire a server tomorrow um 15 pounds per hour 5 p .m to 10 p .m okay we run on um gemini so it's extracted all the data uh gemini one of the the lowest models because

Because if you decide to start an AI company yourself, you're going to get some credits from Google. Exploit them, obviously, because they are free.

And the moment you start earning revenue, you get 20 grand in credits. And the moment you get VC funding, you get 100 grand in credits. I'm not being sponsored by Google,

but they are giving this stuff away, so it's worth knowing about. Okay, so you confirm the location. I've just put it here, but obviously we're live all over London.

We confirm the details. And actually, very soon, next week, we're going to be able to put in mass hiring so if you want to hire multiple people into the same

roles and it's going to be very straightforward through this same interactive system and we're putting um voice command voice control so okay so what we got here they're like okay so

Matching, profiles, and bias-aware ranking

our matching agent is pseudonymized the matching so our matching agent doesn't have access to the the age, the gender, the nationality, even the location of the workers. They know the distance of the worker from the gig.

And so when you are presented as a hiring manager, here are these people which we've got access to their calendars. They're available. They've been ranked, I think, because by years' experience.

So the people with the... This is a buffet server, so it has slightly more years' experience but doesn't match the skill title exactly. And Enable, I say, you can add your own skill title.

we don't force you to do anything so they've been allowed to add whatever he hasn't added a video properly yet

but we help when you create your skill profile we help give you a little video bioscript and we extract skill hashtags to help get a sense

so basically I used to work in corporates and I used to have a situation of getting faced with a lot of CVs so I've tried to template

a skills profile so you suddenly and he can make easy comparisons between the workers that are available. I'm hoping to be able to show you. Here we go.

Oh, you can't hear him. No worries. He's just saying that he's a waiter. It's okay.

And as you can see, Peter's added five different skills, bartender, event staff.

Rethinking ratings and measuring reliability

We don't do star ratings in ABLE. White people benefit in a star rating system, and they've been shown to be detrimental to mental health.

So instead, we ask at the end of every shift, would you work with this person again? And then we rank on how responsive are you? Are you accepting your gig offers?

Are you keeping your calendar up to date? And are you replying to messages?

Was that a time warning? Do I have to carry? No? Oh, okay. So that's it.

And to book these, you read the gig agreement, you press that, and then you book the staff.

And that is how simple, so Abdul Malik and Winnie, who are here that is how easily they were booked for this shift and how they're booked every single week it takes minutes they accept instantly and you just don't that get that kind of service from competitors in terms of speed or cost so we're doing we are doing something completely different

here which is quite exciting here's just an example of all of our mapped workers that are ready to book be booked right now across kitchen events general operations you know this is just the beginning.

I'm really looking forward to expanding more across different skills, different industries and into different regions.

Upcoming event partnerships and inclusivity

I wanted to let you know that we have an event of ourselves next Monday for event managers, community managers, venue managers. Please come along, share this with people in your network.

We're partnering with Deaf Progress, so we wanted to give a space for event managers and community managers and venue managers just to learn about Able to be kind of treated by somebody else because they're always running events themselves and we're also now going to be talking to them about how to make events more inclusive.

I think Able is an incredibly inclusive platform and so we're going to have Crystal Russ who works with Deaf Progress which is a business helping businesses be more deaf inclusive

and Rawlings who's deaf himself and he's going to share some of his experiences of working in events as a deaf person.

Conclusion: invitation to join and seed round

so yeah please share and and get in touch with me if you want to talk about that and we're raising our seed round so any investors in the room I would love to talk to you about the opportunity of investing in this very exciting platform thank you very much for your time it's been a pleasure

Q&A

any questions