With its focus on remedying historical and economic inequities, DEI has become an unassailable component of American life. The ideological framework – more formally known as diversity, equity and inclusion – is now a standard element of how businesses are run and students are taught. (It’s also become a weaponized term, as was the case when a New York Post column said that Kamala Harris would be a “DEI president”.)
Nearly $350bn flowed into DEI and racial justice initiatives during the two years following the 2020 murder George Floyd, according to a report by McKinsey. The DEI industry – mostly consultants whose work focuses on helping organizations review and revise their spending, recruiting and hiring practices – is worth close to $10bn. But over the past few years, DEI programs have been dramatically downsized. Universities such as Harvard and MIT are now scrapping mandatory DEI statements and companies ranging from Nordstrom to Salesforce are slashing related budgets and staffing targets.
“America and corporate America has found itself, yet again, at a cultural crossroads,” said Jeffrey L Bowman, 54, a former advertising executive who now runs his boutique consultancy Reframe AI Technologies. “This requires an entirely new playbook.”
A little more than a decade ago, Bowman left his senior-level job at ad giant Ogilvy & Mather to dip into his own savings and launch Reframe. The prospect was scary, but scaling down was also “quite liberating”, Bowman said. “We stay mission focused, make faster decisions and partner with brands that want to make an impact.” What he misses most about his Ogilvy & Mather days, he said, are the people he used to work with.
Reframe doesn’t so much view diversity as a problem to solve, but as a culture to cultivate. The work has a deeply personal component for Bowman, who grew up in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and whose career started at PepsiCo in 1990. “Over the years climbing the corporate ladder, I witnessed and experienced inequities within the practice of DEI,” he said. “I always said if I got the opportunity to modernize DEI then I would – and here we are today.”
His latest effort to revamp DEI practices resulted in a new AI-powered platform. After four years of development, Bowman recently launched the Reframe small language model (SLM) – think ChatGPT, but with a DEI twist. Working with nearly a dozen engineers around the world and more than 3,000 interviews with a range of corporate leaders and employees, Bowman and his team crunched the data and used it to help clients identify their hurdles and come up with personalized strategies.
The cornerstone of Bowman’s new technology is a digital “personal assistant” – a chatbot that provides instant, on-demand answers and insights. Say, for instance, a manager is struggling with how to solve a specific diversity-related challenge – such as getting employees to become more engaged with DEI programming, or determining how much money is needed to ramp up an organization’s DEI work. The digital assistant is programmed to respond with answers that take into account each user’s unique attitude and history.
Despite the myriad threats that AI poses to privacy, creativity and job security, machine learning has allowed Bowman to provide his clients with more than a typical review and report of recommendations, which can sometimes feel pro forma. It has also allowed Bowman to increase his client base, despite his tiny staff (read: one full-time employee). “Previously it could take months to deliver this type of assessment to a client,” Bowman said. “Now we can complete it in a matter of days.”
Reframe’s current staff is lean: in addition to Bowman and his CTO, the company employs three to four engineering contractors. Depending on project load, up to 10 software developers might be contracted. A steady client base of big-ticket companies “has allowed us to secure debt capital to cover dips in [client] payment cycles”, said Bowman, the author of two business books. Since its founding nine years ago, Reframe has worked with more than 40 Fortune 500 brands. Bowman’s team also partners with smaller companies and non-profits, such as the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the Arts & Science Council of Charlotte, North Carolina.
While AI is so often associated with a data-driven, depersonalized mindset, Bowman said it has brought him closer to his goal of achieving a true culture shift. Meeting numeric targets is not how he measures success. His new tool, he said, allows Reframe to “reach new business places and spaces we otherwise may not be able to reach because we are still small-sized, and still in many ways a startup”.
