Textio, the Seattle-based augmented writing platform, conducted a “broad team reorganization” this week, according to co-founder and CEO Kieran Snyder.
Snyder said the 9-year-old startup adjusted the balance of its sales, customer success, and marketing resources based on anticipated future product growth.
She confirmed that 15 roles were eliminated as part of the first quarter restructuring, other roles were realigned and the company plans to hire for new roles with new skill sets in Q2.
Textio, which established a fully distributed workforce during the pandemic, now employs 107 people.
“Last year’s launch of our performance management product means that we have two products to support now, not just our recruiting product,” Snyder said. “We have realigned our resources to get set up for this in a few different teams.”
Snyder and co-founder Jensen Harris launched Textio in 2014 after working on productivity tools at Microsoft. The startup has raised $42.5 million to date.
Textio uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to help remove bias from workplace language, whether it’s in a job posting or a performance evaluation.
Snyder said generative AI features the company started building a few years ago are “more and more important” to its writing experience. She added that the biggest impact of the recent rise of that technology — on Textio and everyone else — is not just the tech, but reinvented market expectations.
“For all its flaws and biases, ChatGPT is important because it has shown the potential of generative AI to millions of people, not just the usual early adopter crowd,” Snyder said. “People are expecting experiences that feel magical and fast because they have felt firsthand what those experiences are like.”
Snyder, who has written about her use of ChatGPT, said Textio chooses whatever technologies make for the best user experience, whether it’s large language models for one experience or natural language processing for another.
The biggest impact of generative AI is that Textio’s customers now expect certain experiences “as table stakes,” Snyder said, delivered faster than ever before.
“We have a particular role to play because we are the AI provider that people trust to get DEI right,” she said. “Given the pace of innovation in generative AI and the biases in most implementations, that’s a bigger responsibility than it has ever been.”
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