Hilke Schellmann is a professor at New York University, an Emmy award-winning investigative reporter, and the first journalist to uncover widespread race, gender, and disability discrimination in Artificial Intelligence hiring and employment tools. Elle called her “one of the women detoxifying the world of AI.”

Schellmann’s work covering technology has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, the MIT Technology Review, and The Wall Street Journal, where she led a team investigating how AI is changing our lives. She has also reported for NPR’s Planet Money podcast on fake online reviews and her investigation for VICE on HBO was a finalist for a Peabody Award. Her PBS Frontline documentary Outlawed in Pakistan premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was honored with an Emmy award.

In her book, The Algorithm: How AI Decides Who Gets Hired, Monitored, Promoted & Fired & Why We Need to Fight Back Now, which The New York Times called “one of the best five books on AI,” Schellmann investigates the rise of algorithms in the world of work. Drawing on exclusive information from whistleblowers, internal documents, and real‑world tests, she discovers that many of the algorithms making high‑stakes decisions are biased, racist, and do more harm than good. 

Schellmann is a frequent speaker on AI and its societal consequences at tech, HR, and journalism conferences, as well as to customer service professionals in a wide range of industries. She also enjoys engaging with the public in presentations in libraries, and with students at universities. In her talks, she not only shares what she found using innovative methods, but also offers potential solutions.