Introduction
Welcome to Hire We Go!, your go-to podcast for rethinking the future of talent acquisition.
In this episode, Ashlie Collins, Director of Solutions at Joveo, sits down with Sumanta Chakraborty, Founder and CEO of nSpire AI
With nearly three decades in the tech arena – from mobile’s early days to the rise of generative AI – Sumanta shares how agentic AI can unite siloed talent systems, why thoughtful evaluation beats hype when adopting AI, and what a shift to skill-based, quality-first hiring could mean for faster, better outcomes across the talent lifecycle.
Ashlie Collins
Hello and welcome to Hire We Go!, where we’re chatting ALL things talent acquisition transformation. Whether you’re an HR vet or someone who’s just simply fascinated by how to find, attract and engage talent, you are in the right place!
I’m your host and Director of Solutions here at Joveo, Ashlie Collins and joining us today is Sumanta Chakraborty of nSpire AI.
Thank you so much for joining us today! Why don’t we kick things off with you telling us a little bit more about yourself and nSpire AI.
Sumanta Chakraborty
Well, first of all, you did a fantastic job saying my name. A lot of people don’t. And just a short note, I was in Germany as part of my work at one point, and I had to force myself to be Sam because people started calling me Samantha! I’m like, okay, that’s not a good idea. So, you did fantastic.
So glad to be here! And again, thank you for inviting me to this amazing podcast.
My name again is Sumanta Chakraborty. I am the Founder and CEO of nSpire AI, where we are building AI agents for the talent ecosystem.
I’ll talk a little bit more about that later, but just a quick intro. I live in San Francisco. I have been in the tech industry for far too long, almost getting close to three decades actually. And I have been very, very fortunate to be part of some of the most transformative technologies that we have seen from mobile devices in the 90s, to building smartphones when it was not a thing!
Sony actually hired me to build a smartphone killer because Apple just launched the iPhone. I got a call saying, ‘Okay, we need to build an iPhone killer’. So, that’s how we did it.
So, doing that to then working on AI for over a decade now at Nvidia, at Nuance, which is part of Microsoft. And again, very fortunate to have seen the transformation of AI from early days to the generative AI era that we all live in now.
Have built drones and robots and autonomous cars and, you know, amazing stuff. Now I’m building all of those things, bringing those into this part of the world that I’m extremely passionate about at nSpire AI.
So that’s kind of, basically a segue to what is it and why do we exist, who we are!
Like I said, we are building AI agents for the talent ecosystem. It’s my own experience, a few years ago as I was going through the talent acquisition process myself, as I was thinking about what I wanted to do after I left Nuance to then, obviously a hiring process, I felt like this… there’s so many systems…
Ashlie Collins
It needs a lot of love!
Sumanta Chakraborty
I mean, I think, you know, what I realized is that there are a lot of different systems out there, right? From, you know, talent acquisition, talent management, L&D, performance.
There are lots of different systems. There’s no lack of systems. What we felt, at least at nSpire, is that they are all very siloed for many reasons and the ‘intelligence’ is not there.
In a way that as a talent, you go from one place to the other and you almost always start from scratch. So these systems, so kind of, that’s what we are fixing, at least that’s what we’re trying to fix at nSpire, is building that intelligence layer that grows across different systems that exist today, connecting them, building continuity and intelligence across all of them.
And we’re doing that with the latest and best of AI, the world we call it, agentic AI.
So we’re building AI agents for different parts of the talent ecosystem. For example, our flagship product we call Theo, is designed to be a lifelong personalized career coach for every professional.
We want to put that in a billion professional’s pocket, so that you should never have to worry about not having a career coach. And so we truly want to democratize that with it.
And the counterpart of that we call Cynthia, that’s our vision of how the future of recruiting should look like, where Theo and Cynthia works with each other instead of fighting with each other, right?
And then another one, we are calling…we’re finalizing the name, but that’s, you know for now, call it Cleo, to be the future of sales, hiring and coaching and assessments.
And we will build more such agents, but also our vision is how can we empower existing systems to be more intelligent and do more with what they have?
So that’s kind of, in a nutshell about me and what we;re doing at nSpire.
Ashlie Collins
Amazing! And look, you can’t turn the corner without hearing the word AI in our space today. So, I’d be keen to get your take on what you suggest that business leaders look for when they’re considering AI products for their organization.
Sumanta Chakraborty
I think this is such an important question! I was talking about it at another conference lately. And this comes from me being in the industry for a very long time. Like I said, I predate a lot of people when it comes to these and building AI for over a decade.
So, there are certain things that I get super excited about with AI. But there are many things that I’m scared about. It wakes me up in the middle of the night.
So, I think the part that I would recommend as business owners and different functional owners within the business, I expect that not everybody is fully aware of the pros and cons of using AI. So there is definitely a lot of hype in the market about AI.So a couple of things I would highly recommend everybody to kind of be careful, thoughtful about as they implement AI in their organization.
First of all, be very clear about what is it that you are using the AI to solve? What’s the bottleneck in your business that you are trying to solve? Not because somebody else said that’s cool is going to be valuable for you as a business. So are you solving a true hardcore recruiting problem because your volume is way too high, everybody wants to work at your company? Are you trying to solve your outbound sales problem or are you trying to solve a customer service problem?
So being very thoughtful about what is it that is going to make an impact in your business is step one, right? Now, that’s probably an easier part of the problem. The difficult part of it is choosing the right solution because there are just too many nowadays and the reason there are so many nowadays is that the barrier to build AI applications has gone down so much.
You guys all have heard of like, this vibe coding, right? People are sitting over a weekend and asking AI to build an entire application and a product. Now that sounds very good from a prototype perspective. Looks very shiny. That’s not what the businesses need, right?
So how do you understand what is real product versus what’s a prototype is something where I suggest the business owners to take a much deeper look at it.
In a couple of weeks you can do that is, just go deeper onto how long has this company existed? How long have they been building this particular product? What are the other customers? What’s the background of the founding team, right?
So once you kind of dig deeper into it, you will kind of get a sense of, is this something that is thoughtfully built, or is it like a hack over a weekend, right?
And then along with it comes security and privacy. In a business world, you have to be very, very careful about it. So are the GDPR, SOC, and FERPA, and other certified or not, right?
I think, again, to summarize, know what your ROI is. What is it that you’re truly trying to solve? Take your time to evaluate the products that are out there in the market.
You’ll be inundated and flooded with it, right? So take your time. Don’t rush into it. And once you are convinced, then go ahead and implement it. Take your time. Maybe do a POC and then go, full on, if that makes sense.
Ashlie Collins
Yeah, because I think we’ve already seen on our space that if you don’t take your time, somebody else will come stress test it for you and find the inefficiencies you didn’t catch. So, best to protect yourself.
And just to close us off on a final thought here, if you had a magic wand, what would you change about talent sourcing in 2025?
Sumanta Chakraborty
So I think about it all day. And again, part of what nSpire is building is along that.
And I think, this is a new learning, you know, actually for me. I am an outsider into this space, like I told you in my background.
One thing that I have observed here is that this industry is still heavily focused on quantity over quality in many cases, right?
This whole fear of missing out that, ‘I want a lot of applicants to apply to the job and I will go through the system’.
I think there is a better way. I mean, this system, this process will be broken with AI. It is already broken.
I mean, you see the number of applications that any company is getting today is pretty insane.
So I think the way we have seen the world work where, post a job and thousands of people apply to it and you have an ATS that is going to filter out, go through the process…
I think AI is going to challenge it, it is already challenging it severely.
So if I had a magic wand, I would try to move completely towards a vetted, skill-based hiring process that doesn’t rely on volume but relies more on the quality of the applicants.
That can truly shorten the process of hiring from in a month to weeks, but not only that, but also increase the overall quality so that, you know, the good people that you hire are staying on with you for a long time
Ashlie Collins
Yeah, I love that. Thank you so much for sharing your insights, especially from the outside view. I think we can, we talked about how close knit of a community we can be sometimes, so to get that fresh perspective is just really exciting. Appreciate your time and thank you all so much for joining us. Until next time!
Conclusion
That wraps up today’s episode of Hire We Go!. We dove into the evolving intersection of AI and talent, exploring how thoughtful evaluation, genuine innovation, and a focus on skill-based hiring can fundamentally shift talent acquisition toward quality and impact.
A huge thank you to Sumanta Chakraborty for sharing his unique insights and journey with us, and thanks to all of you for listening in. Stay tuned for more conversations that challenge the status quo and transform how we approach hiring in the modern era. Until next time!
