Indeed CEO Chris Hyams on how AI talent agents could help jobseekers find opportunities

Many employees today are fearful that artificial intelligence will automate their tasks and ultimately replace them. A third of workers want it banned from the workplace altogether.

But what if AI tools could be refitted to help jobseekers instead? That’s exactly what job-search site Indeed is experimenting with, as the company recently announced at its FutureWorks conference in Dallas.

Indeed CEO Chris Hyams, during a presentation, previewed a new AI-powered tool that will—eventually—help bring personalized AI talent agents to the beck and call of jobseekers who use the Indeed platform. The tool, which has not yet been released, is designed to help people use AI to further their careers in new ways.

“The world of work is going to change pretty rapidly in the coming years,” Hyams tells Fast Company.

The idea, Hyams says, is that an AI “agent” would have intention, working on behalf of jobseekers to go out and try to find them new opportunities for jobs. “What we’re trying to do is create an entity that will get you that opportunity,” he says.

How these tools will work

In effect, the agentic AI tool will be able to analyze a jobseeker’s background and skills, and dig up potential job placements or opportunities that may go under a jobseeker’s radar, or that may be skills-adjacent—that is, they may be a good fit for a position in terms of the skills they have, even if the job description isn’t necessarily something they’ve done before.

Ultimately, these ‘agents’ would be able to speed up the job-search process and, hopefully, help candidates land more interviews and offers.

Interestingly, Hyams says that the advent of ‘agents’ is the culmination of an idea that he and others at Indeed started kicking around years ago, but lacked the technology to bring to life until now.

“I started at Indeed 14 years ago,” he says, “and this idea of the talent agent was the big idea that we came up with, but it seemed like something way off in the future. But as soon as GPT came out, it was clear this could be done today.”

Hyams also says that the tool, and AI more generally, as it’ll be utilized on the Indeed platform, is only in its initial stages, which could be great news for jobseekers in the years ahead as AI’s capabilities evolve. “This is version 0.1 of what we’re going to be able to do with these tools,” he says.