Evernote Co-Founder Phil Libin Invests in AI-Powered Chatbot to Facilitate Workplace Abuse Reporting

Approximately 75% of workplace harassment cases are never brought to light. This alarming reality has prompted Evernote co-founder Phil Libin to throw his support behind a startup designed to simplify the process of reporting misconduct.

True to Silicon Valley form, the venture is developing an AI-driven application. The chatbot will guide users through questions about workplace events and capture their answers, functioning similarly to a journal.

Named Spot, the application debuted this Tuesday. It prompts users to describe incidents of harassment or discrimination they’ve encountered at work. Co-founders Dr. Julia Shaw, Dylan Marriott, and Dr. Daniel Nicolae believe their solution can motivate individuals to come forward faster and with greater precision than if they spoke directly with HR personnel.

"When you report harassment to a person, bias can creep in, they might pose suggestive questions, and you may worry about confidentiality," explained Dr. Shaw. She earned her PhD in psychology from the University of British Columbia and, alongside her role at Spot, serves as a research associate at University College London.

Shaw headed a research group that crafted Spot to pose open-ended, impartial queries using the 'cognitive interview' technique—a method first designed to enhance police questioning in investigations.

When an employee faces unwelcome conduct at work, they can visit Spot’s website and interact with a chatbot featuring a text-message-like interface. The bot poses a sequence of questions about the incident. Leveraging natural language processing, it asks follow-up queries regarding particular individuals and locations referenced. Afterwards, Spot assembles the data into a PDF report that is time-stamped and encrypted, which users can download and forward to themselves or their employer.

Users have the option to file complaints without revealing their identity, prompting concerns about how organizations can verify such allegations. Libin argues that accepting some unverifiable reports is preferable to receiving none at all.

"As a middle-aged white male CEO, my initial gut response was, 'Oh no, this will trigger excessive reporting and spam'—a typical reflexive reaction since discrimination and harassment aren't top of mind for such individuals," Libin remarked. However, the entrepreneur contends that the genuine issue is underreporting, not the negligible rate of false claims.

In the United States, employers are legally required to probe any harassment or discrimination allegations they receive. Yet, according to Spot’s legal counsel Paul Livingston—a practicing attorney in the UK—companies bear less responsibility for investigating anonymous, unverifiable complaints. However, if multiple anonymous accusations target the same individual, the employer may become legally obligated to conduct an inquiry, he noted.

Currently, Spot is offered at no cost, but the team intends to eventually impose fees on employers seeking access to the reports. The backend data infrastructure needed to support such access has not yet been constructed.

Libin’s company, All Turtles—which offers financial backing and resources like engineering talent and office space to startups—is currently injecting $500,000 in cash into Spot. Additionally, it is allocating in-kind resources from All Turtles’ budget, including legal expertise, which Libin estimates to be worth another $500,000.

Spot is not the first technology aimed at aiding victims of abuse. Callisto, a nonprofit that developed a self-reporting system for sexual harassment on college campuses, debuted two and a half years ago. Convercent, a provider of ethics and compliance software for corporations, rolled out a texting bot for sexual harassment last October. Meanwhile, the STOPit app collaborates with educational institutions and companies to collect anonymous reports.

For the time being, Spot is the sole tool concentrating exclusively on workplace harassment, and it positions its artificial intelligence as a superior method for soliciting reports.

"We have strong faith in technology’s capacity to help people become better versions of themselves," Libin stated.