🤖 AI eats Chegg’s homework

Numerous studies have found that companies benefit from diverse workforces in myriad ways:

• Diverse companies enjoy 2.5x higher cash flow per employee.
• They have higher employee retention and 22% less turnover.
• Inclusive teams make better decisions up to 87% of the time.

Yet there’s often a gap between companies’ DEI goals and execution. Blavity Inc. — the tech and media company founded for Black millennials in 2014 — and its professional network, AfroTech, seek to close that gap with its first SaaS platform, Talent Infusion.

“AfroTech has been fighting against…

… the narrative that there’s not enough talented Black folks in technology,” Simone White, SVP of AfroTech at Blavity, told The Hustle. “I think the biggest thing is providing spaces for [companies] to have direct connection with the talent pools that they want.”

AfroTech has done this through its annual conference, which drew 25k attendees in 2022, and executive series.

But many of AfroTech’s 200+ corporate partners wanted to connect with talent year-round. Talent Infusion now offers just that.

How it works

AfroTech solicits its community for resumes, vets potential candidates, and adds them to Talent Infusion.

Enterprise organizations pay a monthly or annual fee to access the resumes. They can also build talent pools filtered by experience, location, and other parameters.

For now, the tool is focused on tech employees, but AfroTech’s goal is to expand into other industries.

How can companies retain diverse talent?

White, of course, recommends directing employees to AfroTech, where Black talent can find community and feel empowered to learn, develop, and upskill.

Second, she said, is to continuously hire and fill pipelines with diverse talent.

“Sometimes the feeling of, ‘I’m gonna always be the only one,’ is really daunting, so [make] sure that you’re also sharing… the efforts that you’re putting forward,” she said.

Interested in Talent Infusion? Organizations can go to TalentInfusion.io to learn more, while job seekers can submit resumes to AfroTech here.

Ah, history’s great innovators: Edison, Jobs, students in need of answers for homework due tomorrow, da Vinci, Gates, Einstein…

Since the dawn of school, students have found ways to get “help” on their homework. In recent decades, one of the most reliable has been Chegg.

The homework-helping site estimates a huge market for its services — 100m students globally, 8.1m of whom subscribed in 2022.

So, if the need for Chegg is that great, why was its stock down ~50% this week?

Do explain…

The cliff dive came after CEO Dan Rosensweig told investors he sees ChatGPT “having an impact on our new customer growth.”

It was a PR-mageddon. Analysts chopped price targets. “Chegg shares drop more than 40% after company says ChatGPT is killing its business,” read a CNBC headline. Other edtech stocks dipped on the news, too.

For Rosensweig, though, Chegg’s drop was “extraordinarily overblown.”

If you can beat ‘em, join ‘em

Tech firms are increasingly working to embrace AI tools like ChatGPT, while leveraging proprietary data. That way they can still, you know, make money.

Rosensweig, who said he’s met with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on the subject, is focused on a tool called CheggMate, which combines ChatGPT’s technology with Chegg’s library — a super comp-tutor, if you will.

The unknown for Chegg — and the rest of a wary edtech industry — is whether vetted academic data will be enough to go up against free, improving chatbots.

BTW: One thing you won’t see from Chegg anytime soon: NFTs. “We didn’t see those as real or important or as threats,” Rosensweig said.