This week at the WIHTL & DiR Inclusion Summit, I had the joy of sitting down with David Hughes, Global Head of Talent at Costa Coffee, to talk about something that matters deeply to both of us: how inclusion really happens at scale.
One phrase came up again and again from the retail leaders in the room:
Leave no one behind.
That’s a powerful idea. But it’s also a hard one to execute.
When you have tens or even hundreds of thousands of people applying for jobs, how do you really give everyone a fair go?
How do you make inclusion practical, measurable, and sustainable, not just a statement of intent?
At Sapia.ai, we’ve learned that inclusion starts with listening.
Our AI chat interview has now listened to more than 8 million candidates worldwide. And when you listen at that scale, you begin to see what inclusion really looks like — not as a program or policy, but as a system of fairness built into every stage of hiring.
The Costa Coffee Story: Inclusion You Can Measure
Costa Coffee, one of the UK’s most loved brands, faced the same challenge every major retailer does:
they wanted to reflect the diversity of the communities they serve, but their traditional hiring process wasn’t built for it.
The old system was fast, but not always fair. It sorted and filtered people out, often before they had the chance to be heard.
By reimagining their process with Sapia.ai’s ethical AI, Costa made a simple but profound change: everyone gets an interview.
And the results speak for themselves:
-
200,000+ candidates interviewed through Sapia.ai’s smart chat
-
90.7% completion rate
-
8.8/10 candidate satisfaction
-
72% brand advocacy, meaning candidates who weren’t hired still recommended Costa as an employer
-
Less than 1% variance in gender outcomes across the entire hiring funnel
When you design a system where fairness and transparency are built in from the start, where bias is removed from that crucial first interaction, inclusion stops being a campaign slogan. It becomes the default.
Or, as David Hughes shared on stage:
“We wanted every candidate to feel treated with dignity. For it to feel like Costa, from the very first touchpoint.”
Inclusion at Scale
What Costa Coffee and so many other leading retailers are proving is that ethical AI doesn’t replace human connection. It scales it.
This is what we call moving from inclusion by hand to inclusion at scale.
Because inclusion built on empathy, measurement, and science can reach everyone, not just the ones you have time to interview.
When you listen to every voice, you uncover talent you’d otherwise never see.
That’s the real promise of ethical AI in hiring: a fair, data-driven way to build diverse teams that reflect the world around us.Inclusion starts with listening.
AI, done responsibly, makes it possible to listen to everyone.
About Author
