This Tech CEO Helped People Get Jobs. He Quit To Fight For Workers In The AI Era

The Career Switch is a series that highlights real people who have made successful career pivots in the face of a changing economy. Know someone who should be featured? Email me at cconnley@forbes.com.

During his three decades in tech and 15 years at Indeed, Chris Hyams reached a level that many professionals would envy. For six years he was CEO of Indeed, one of the world’s largest job platforms; it houses 680 million job-seeker profiles and is used by more than 3.5 million employers worldwide. As head of the more than 10,000 employee company, Hyams helped to build several of Indeed’s artificial intelligence-powered products including one called Pathfinder, which helps users discover career paths—either in their current field or in an entirely new one—by analyzing the skills they already have.

“I’ve never loved a job more and I never loved a mission more,” the 59-year-old says of his work at Indeed. But as artificial intelligence started to rapidly transform many industries, including his own, Hyams started to question the narrative Silicon Valley was putting out about AI and how it would eventually replace large amounts of human work.

“I think that’s a significant problem,” says Hyams, while emphasizing that he believes “we need more humans now than ever” to work alongside AI rather than be replaced by it. “What that means is that in a lot of corporate America, the pressure from boards and the pressure from investors is how can you get more efficient? Which means how can you fire more people and replace them with AI? And that's not why I got into this business. I got into it because I care about people.”

In the following interview, Hyams talks about his transition from the C-Suite to the classroom, his policy and advocacy work around responsible AI, and why he believes AI is one of the most important “civil rights and human rights issue of our time.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What have all of your pivots taught you about starting over?