- Eventbrite CEO Julia Hartz tells Fortune she uses AI to complement her emotional judgment in hiring and promotion decisions, leveraging personality tests and data-driven insights to reduce bias and better understand team dynamics. She credits AI with helping her identify development gaps, improve coaching, and make more consistent decisions—enabling the company to cut reliance on expensive recruiting firms.
Fears are rife that AI will be the reason for job losses, but one CEO is doing precisely the opposite—she’s using it to figure out who she should be hiring and promoting.
Like many of her contemporaries, Eventbrite’s CEO Julia Hartz is embracing emerging technology for the efficiencies and insights it can offer. She’s also using it to balance her emotional, human reactions with the rationality of tech.
Hartz founded the events management and ticketing business with her husband Kevin, and the company’s founding technical architect Renaud Visage in 2006. The company now has a market cap of more than $225 million.
Hartz took over the top job from her spouse in 2016, as the pair had agreed to switch roles after 10 years of running the company.
With the Hartz family treating the business like a sibling to their daughters, teamwork and emotional investment has been built into the DNA of the brand.
But with AI rapidly improving seemingly by the day, Hartz is using the technology to match the “human emotional mind” with relatively unbiased decision-making.
Hartz explained she’s utilizing AI through personality tests, preferring the Hogan method to establish how complementary her style is with teammates and candidates.
Speaking to Fortune in an exclusive interview in London, Hartz explained: “The Hogan series is pretty in depth, and is about how you react to certain landscapes shifting. And then I’m actually able to draw a through line between my Hogan test to a candidate’s Hogan, and using AI can assess the places where it’s going to cause friction, and where are we not going to show up great together?”
Of course, one of the major questions about AI at present is how accurate its results are, and how much of the inputter’s assumptions it absorbs in its analysis.
That being said, studies have demonstrated that AI can draw fairly accurate conclusions about personality traits—to some extents even more so than a person’s family and friends.
Even a decade ago, before most people had even heard the phrase ‘large language model’, researchers at the University of Cambridge and Stanford University discovered AI could draw very accurate personality conclusions about an individual based on their digital footprint.
Indeed, using Facebook ‘likes’ alone, the AI reached judgements similar to those of the individual’s nearest and dearest, with the milestone being described as an “emphatic demonstration” that the technology could discover an individual’s psychological traits through data analysis alone.
While accuracy when it comes to relationship analysis may lie in the “eye of the beholder,” Hartz adds, it’s been incredibly beneficial in helping her overcome certain habits, she explained: “When you think about how you relate to other people, I actually see that there’s a big opportunity here to not judge a book by its cover, to actually not be biased, based on ‘I like this person.’ There’s a really interesting way to relate to people in a much deeper way.”
Identifying mentoring gaps
At present, Hartz is using AI as a tool to help assess people for different roles and see where she can help develop them, as opposed to incorporating it more widely into her everyday decision-making at the San Francisco-based company.
She explained: “It’s mostly about how I’ve chosen the people I’ve hired as of late, or the people that I’ve asked to step up into roles, and the insights that I have about what I’m asking them to do and and how they’ll show up.
“And then it’s also where I can help coach them—so much about being a good coach or mentor is assessing where the gaps might be, but also one of the things with managers is the missed expectations, particularly at the CEO level.
“So I’m really curious about how to reverse engineer the expectation to the skills and the personality of the person to help figure out how to intentionally develop them to that place where they can meet that expectation.”
But the tool also helps Hartz with more consistent decision-making, she explained: “It gives me a different perspective that is not based on how I’m feeling that day or my last interaction with that person. It has totally opened the aperture of human potential.”
While the CEO added she is using AI in many different ways to automate “little things that frustrate me”, Hartz may not be taking her AI usage as far as peers.
A study released earlier this year found that 74% of executives are more confident asking AI for business advice than colleagues or friends, according to research by SAP, a data and software company.
But these leaders are putting their faith even more fully in the hands of the bots, with 38% saying they trust AI to make business decisions for them, and 44% deferring to the technology’s reasoning over their own insights.
AI “gives me a different perspective”, said Hartz, and poses questions about “how I think “how I should think about human potential differently, which is very interesting because it’s a robot.”
Indeed, Eventbrite’s experiments with AI in this sense have proved so useful the business no longer needs enterprise licenses for “fancy recruiting firms”, added Hartz, because she can see the results of this research herself.
“It’s not inaccessible, and I think recruiting firms are definitely on the chopping block in terms of industries that will get disrupted [because of AI],” added Hartz.
