Introducing Submittable’s Responsible AI Principles

At Submittable, our mission is to accelerate mission-driven work. Innovation is central to that acceleration. Breakthrough technologies such as artificial intelligence represent enormous potential for humanity as a whole, and especially the social impact sector.

Submittable has the opportunity to create products that empower our customers to deliver exponentially more impact across their programs and beneficiaries. The deployment of our AI tools are a part of making progress on a variety of vital causes across public, nonprofit, and private sectors, from affordable, community-based child care to fighting and building resilience to climate change.

As part of this work, we have a duty to ensure all AI technology we develop is responsible, ethical, and impactful. To that end, Submittable adheres to a set of principles for responsible AI.

Our Journey

Submittable first released AI-powered capabilities in the spring of 2021 to support our clients expecting tens or hundreds of thousands—even a million—applications, in response to primarily highly in-demand COVID-relief funding. With Automated Review, the technology takes care of tedious tasks, like extracting data from tax forms or identification documents, or applying automated scoring based on custom-defined business logic.

This opens up space for our customers to focus on program-critical work that requires a human touch—like building relationships with applicants and awardees.

Then, in early 2024, we released new AI-powered innovations empowering applicants to auto-fill forms, and extracting data from official documents like W2s.

In August of 2024, Submittable joined forces with WizeHive. With the power of our combined expertise, we now offer Smart Summaries of applications, and Smart Reviewer to evaluate and score applications. We're committed to continuing to innovate with AI at the forefront. To that end and with new leadership in place, we've updated our Responsible AI Principles guiding this work.

Submittable’s Principles for Responsible AI

Focused & Empowering

Help people achieve more within tasks explicitly defined by humans. 

Transparent & Controlled

Make users aware of when, where, and why AI is available, and allow them to choose whether or not to use it.

Accountable & Reversible 

Maintain human control at all times. Every AI-influenced action is traceable, reversible, and responsive to human intervention.

Equitable & In Community

Prevent AI from perpetuating or amplifying systemic inequities by mitigating and correcting for bias, limiting its decision-making scope, and consulting community stakeholders. 

Private & Secure 

Implement world-class measures to ensure data is private, secure, and never shared.

Our vision

Our vision is to make AI our customers' trusted partner in progress.

Submittable’s customers do fundamentally human work tackling society's greatest challenges. They steward public and private resources to feed the hungry, serve vulnerable populations, and safeguard our planet for the health and enjoyment of future generations. 

AI tools built for this work can—and must—help us rethink what’s possible while preserving what makes us uniquely human. 

Through strict human oversight, we will create AI tools that go beyond simply helping our customers work faster. Our customers will gain essential partners in their work, solving complex problems more completely and improving the lives of people around the world.

By getting it right, we help AI answer the call to advance the best of humanity.

What's Next

Ot doesn't end here.

Our near-term roadmap includes AI-powered innovations like automated workflow management and chatbots to support applicants. Within a few years, we're looking to embed AI assistants for all user roles, offer intelligent impact assessment and forecasting, and more.

We hope you're excited about joining us on this journey.