The Story of Included AI: Building the Future of Equitable Workplaces

Long before founding Included AI, Raghu Gollamudi was taking apart electronics in India, driven by an insatiable curiosity to build and create. “I opened up the television and I connected the Walkman to the speakers of the television,” he recalled in a recent episode of Category Visionaries. When the experiment blew a fuse, rather than give up, he learned to fix it – creating his first DIY boombox in the process.

This builder’s mindset would shape his entire career trajectory. After moving to the United States, Raghu spent a decade at Microsoft, where he discovered something unexpected: the power of people-focused leadership. “Microsoft is big time into people and culture,” he shared. “They believe in their people, they believe in promoting culture within the organization.”

The experience opened his eyes to his own biases and provided tools to become a better leader. But it wasn’t until 2020, after selling his previous company to OneTrust, that Raghu found his true calling. The catalyst? The murder of George Floyd.

“I saw how the nation stepped up against it,” Raghu explained. “And it got etched into my mind that I need to do something from DEI angle.” Drawing parallels to his experience in privacy tech during the GDPR era, he noticed a similar pattern emerging: companies scrambling to hire Chief Diversity Officers just as they had previously rushed to hire Chief Privacy Officers.

This observation led to the founding of Included AI, initially focused on DEI recruitment. The platform showed immediate promise, helping customers achieve “a 30% increase in offers per woman within like 1st 90 days.” But when the economic downturn hit and hiring froze, the company faced a pivotal moment.

Instead of doubling down on their initial approach, they listened to their customers who asked them to apply their technology to retention and calibration. This pivot proved transformative, leading to the realization that “DI tech by itself does not make sense because DI tech needs to be embedded into the HR analytics aspect.”

Today, Included AI helps companies understand their workforce data in unprecedented ways. In one case, they analyzed 8,000 different demographic combinations to identify 30 potential bias hotspots in employee calibrations – far beyond the single gender dimension their client had previously examined.

The company’s approach to AI sets them apart in an increasingly crowded market. Rather than building black-box solutions that make automated decisions, they focus on augmenting human judgment. “What we do is it’s more like a complementary feature as opposed to automatic decision making feature,” Raghu emphasized.

Looking to the future, Raghu’s vision extends far beyond analytics. “We will eventually transition into a people experience space,” he explained. The ultimate goal? “Providing equitable experiences for every employee in an organization so that they can realize their full potential.”

This vision isn’t just about creating better HR tools – it’s about fundamentally changing how organizations understand and support their people. “Every individual is different, the needs are different to be successful,” Raghu noted. “I want to build a platform that’s able to understand that, provide the right experience to the manager about the employee, to the employee about what they need to do to be successful.”

From that young boy in India figuring out how to turn a Walkman into a boombox to the CEO working to transform workplace equity, Raghu’s journey reflects a consistent theme: using technology to solve complex problems in creative ways. With Included AI, he’s not just building another HR tool – he’s working to create a future where every employee has an equal opportunity to succeed.