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Welcome back! Job seekers are increasingly running into employers using artificial intelligence-powered job interviewers, and the process has garnered backlash and in some cases sparked lawsuits from spurned candidates. But AI interviewers might actually increase candidates’ chances of getting hired. A new research study published this week from the University of Chicago and the University of Rotterdam suggests that AI agents may actually be more effective than human interviewers when it comes to filling open roles. Researchers ran an experiment in which job applicants were randomly assigned to a human or AI interviewer, or were given a choice between the two. The researchers worked with a recruiting firm, PSG Global Solutions, which screened over 70,000 applicants based in the Philippines for entry-level customer service jobs at 43 different companies, including 23 Fortune 500 firms. Human recruiters reviewed all of the resulting interview transcripts and audio recordings to make a final decision about whether to hire the candidates, after also taking into account math and verbal tests candidates completed separately. The human recruiters had predicted that the AI would be worse at interviewing candidates, compared to human interviewers. But, surprisingly, the study found the opposite: candidates that were verbally interviewed by AI were 12% more likely to receive a job offer than those interviewed by humans, and had a 6% higher likelihood of actually starting the job and remaining in the job after a month. Despite the hand-wringing about AI taking over job interviews, the study found evidence that job candidates would rather be interviewed by AI. Among candidates that were given a choice between a human or AI interview before the interview took place, 78% chose AI. “There’s preliminary evidence that the AI is more focused, and lets the human candidates speak more, which means it can collect more signals from candidates,” said Brian Jabarian, a University of Chicago researcher and one of the study’s authors. Companies are increasingly automating HR functions like recruiting and job interviews, thanks in part to voice AI products from OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon and Google that can handle long conversations. The authors of the study did not disclose which AI model they used to power their AI chatbot. Now that the study has concluded, Jabarian and PSG Global Solutions are planning to conduct more research to explore whether AI can be applied to other HR functions, PSG said in a statement. “Over millions of candidates, shifting even just one percent in quality would be insane,” Jabarian said. AWS Faces Questions Over AI Coding Prices Kiro, the AI coding service Amazon Web Services launched as a free preview last month, initially received mostly positive reviews from early users. But the reaction wasn’t as good after the cloud provider last week revealed prices for the service. For instance, in a GitHub post over the weekend, Antonio Ribeiro, a Brazil-based software engineer, described Kiro’s pricing as “a wallet-wrecking tragedy” because he found it too easy to run through the usage allotments and incur overage charges. Similar to other coding services, Kiro has several subscription tiers, up to $200 a per month, and starts charging 4 or 20 cents per coding request after the customer goes beyond a certain number of requests. It’s the latest example of how AI providers are still figuring out the economics of coding services, which can be a drain on their profits due to the costs of running the AI. In another case, the maker of Cursor recently faced an uproar last month after introducing usage-based pricing, and Anthropic and Windsurf (now part of Cognition, which also has usage-based pricing) have seen similar friction over pricing increases and usage limits lately. While the venture-backed startups can subsidize the costs of running their services in order to attract a base of customers, AWS might not have that same luxury because it has to keep up its profit margins or lose face with Wall Street, said Corey Quinn, a cloud economist at The Duckbill Group who helps AWS customers save money on their bills. AWS, in an announcement posted to its Discord channel earlier today, said it is working on an update to Kiro’s pricing and plans to share details later this week. “We hear your feedback that pricing isn't working for how many of you use Kiro. There were also some inconsistencies in how many Vibes and Specs Kiro consumes per request that we are looking into,” AWS said in the announcement.
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