(upbeat synthesizer pop music) >> Announcer: Live, from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, brought to you by siliconANGLE Media. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Grace Hopper conference here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We are joined by Ilit Raz. She is the CEO of Joonko, an AI-powered diversity and inclusion coach for companies. >> Ilit: That's right. >> Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you for inviting me. So, I'd love it for you to just start talking about how you came up with the idea for Joonko. >> Sure, so I grew up in Israel, originally from Israel, spent about 14 years in the tech industry. Before that, doing computer science in high school, I was almost the only woman all along the way, for like 15 years, and I think the weird thing, I never thought it's a weird thing. This is how I grew up. I was one out of two doing computer science in high school, spent a few years in the Intelligence Unit, was the only woman around and this is how I grew up. And then, like 2 1/2 years ago, I joined a group of Women in Product Management in Israel. We, like, I went to their first Meetup. It was 250 women there. Israeli people have this perception of everyone knows everyone and I went into the room and literally know, like knew no one and I was like, "That's weird." And, then I think I realized, like, "We have a problem." I went back to two other friends, we worked on another venture before, and said, "Hey, what do you about changing what we're doing "to doing something for women in the workplace?" And, they were like, "Actually, that sounds awesome," and we started thinking about what is already outside in the market, what are companies doing now? And, I come from a lot of cybersecurity background and I'm like, "What do you think about doing anti-virus for biases?" >> Ooh. >> And, this is how we started this AI stuff and everything like this and as we moved forward, I'm starting to talk with a lot of companies. We realized the biggest barrier for a company was like understand what's happening on a day-to-day stuff for employees all around the world. Like, if they're head of HR or head of Diversity sitting in San Francisco or whatever in their headquarters, how do you know what's happening with your employees like at a really low level in offices around the world? And, we realized, like-- >> So, it's not just for the recruitment. It's also in terms of who's getting promotions, who's getting the choice assignments, who's-- >> That's right. What kind of language are you using when you talk on Slack? What type of code review do give to your female engineers versus a male engineer? Who gets promoted? What type of language are you using on peer-to-peer evaluations and all this type of stuff. >> That stuff is so hard and it sort of seems, >> Yeah. >> the code review assignments, it seems like a minor thing, but, in fact... >> It's really important. Like, if you get like, "You need to fix this," exclamation mark, and you're like, that's not really nice and it doesn't make you feel like, okay, I want to go ahead and fix it and probably you don't give this same thing to a male developer. You're like, "Maybe there is another way to do it," and you use different phrases and different tone. And, also, we see like on Slack messages, when there is a development channel, usually you're not going to see women and people of color are as active as men, just because they're usually a small portion of the team, even one person on the team. So, I think this is like the main stuff that's happening on day-to-day stuff that are not like trying to get the most important role in the company, but actually do I get a spot, generally speaking, in the company. Do I feel comfortable? Like, if someone making a joke is like, "You look so gay," as a joke, and you as a gay person, whether you are outspoken gay or not, like probably if you've spoken about it or not, then you don't feel very comfortable, even if it's a joke. >> Right. >> Like, it's not really funny. >> Right, right, right. >> So, how does your technology work? So, it detects these biases. >> Right. >> It understands when there are, is aggressive or hostile language to women or other minority groups and then what? >> So, basically we connect to these everyday SaaS platforms companies are using, so you had mentioned recruiting is one of them, Slack, Salesforce, Atlassian, basically all the companies around here, and then once we connect with these platforms, we peel out the data in real time, all the time. We analyze the data, we look for patterns and when we get this metric, okay, there is a pattern here that was probably based on biases, we reach out to the most relevant person, like the person who has the most effect on the current situation. Whether it's you as a female developer that needs to be more active or you as a recruiter that was just keeping these 10 diverse candidate CV reviews, you as an individual who can make the most impact on the current situation, we're going to reach out to you, whether via email or Slack message, and say, "Hey, this is the situation, "and here is how you can fix it." So, we have another engine that like matched a problem with a solution. >> With an action? >> Yeah, with an action that you can do in like less than two minutes, so it should be like a really quick thing that you can do on the go. You don't need to like, "Okay, I need to set time for this Joonko thing." No. >> Right. >> It's like super-quick thing >> Right, right. >> that you can do or you need to do and it basically should help you either really improve the situation or basically overcome it before it gets to like what we call, we call it like micro-events of unconscious biases before it gets like really big thing. >> So, are people, so it really is putting the onus on the individual to act. >> That's right. And, are, do people do it? Is there follow through? >> Yes. >> What are you seeing? >> I think that the numbers that we have on even open rates for the insights that we send and follow-up rates, I think every marketing company in the US would love to have these numbers; like they are really, really high. I think it's just people, like for the first two times, they give it a try and when they see that it's really helping, they just keep doing it. Like, we have one company that reached out to us and say, "We know you have a limit of three engagements a week, "because you don't want to bother us, can you take it off? "We want to get all of them. "We really find them helpful on our day-to-day stuff. "Can you give us more of these insights?" So, I think people are like really into giving it a try and then see that it's helpful and keep using it. Like, we really see high improvement, so I think that's another good reason for people to kind of keep engaging. So, yeah, people are super happy about it. >> So, what are you finding? What do your clients tell you is the return on investment, here? >> I think the first main stuff that we see, one, because we have a lot of capabilities, of like, let's take recruiting, for example, when you look at recruiting and a company say, like, "We want to improve our recruiting numbers," they don't really know beside the fact that someone voluntarily gives their ethnicity, age, gender, whatever, they don't know who is the applicant unless they manually take like one person by one. We know how to analyze gender and race automatically by email addresses for like 90% of the candidates, so it actually gives a really clear picture for a company. Like, okay, what is happening in our recruiting efforts and where we, where are the pitfalls and where do we fail? And, it's basically like turning the light in place they like, they had no clue what's-- >> Showing them their blind spots, yeah. >> Yeah, that they had no idea what's going on. In other places, like what's going on on Slack channels, I don't think anyone here knows what's happening on their Slack channels. It's really, really hard to follow. So, I think it's the smaller spots and the like little places that we can turn, basically, turn on the light for a lot of companies. >> And, so who are your companies? Are they already the forward-thinking companies or are you seeing-- >> You have, I think at this point, you have to be a forward-thinking company to go ahead, give a third-party access to all this stuff, really want to make a change. Honestly, I think you need to be like a few hundreds, maybe lower few thousands, to actually being able to make a quick change. Like, for our companies that have a few hundred employees, they see, in less than three months, 5% to 8% improvement on your recruiting efforts, like actually hiring more diverse candidates. I think when you get to a size of like 100,000, and 200,000 employees, making a 1% change-- >> Rebecca: It's a lot harder. >> It's much harder. >> So what is your message to those companies? >> Wow, I think, A, start with business units. Don't make this huge announcement with like you're going to be 50/50 by 2020. To get to 50/50 by 2020, you need to fire half of your team and then hire half diverse candidates, like half diverse. >> So, start small. Start small. >> Start small, start where pains really are. Don't say you have 50/50 when all the 50 are in marketing and sales and like assistants or whatever and then on your R and D teams, you have like 10/90, which is what most companies have. So, start small and, I guess, lead by example by putting money into internal work and not marketing out or like go ahead and be like, volunteer work, come here to Grace Hopper. This is nice, but this is more customer-facing marketing versus actually doing something internally to change the numbers, so. >> Great, great. Well, Ilit Raz, thank you so much for joining us. >> You're welcome. Thank you for having me. >> It was a pleasure, yes. >> Thank you very much. >> We will have more from theCUBE's coverage of the Grace Hopper conference in a little bit. (upbeat synthesizer pop music)