Gritty Talent currently supplies 50+ creative sector clients with Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) products/services. The team is based in Bristol and operates pan UK. After a 20+ year career in TV and Digital (BBC, Channel 4, TEDx) Mel Rodrigues founded Gritty Talent to develop smart, scalable ways to act on the UK TV & Film's considerable EDI challenges. This project will bring Gritty Talent together with High-End TV/Film production company Floating Harbour Studios to develop a novel solution to enable industry-led scale-up of sector EDI transformation. This will improve accuracy and speed of GT's EDI services, driving a step-change in productivity for clients/sector stakeholders, who must hit mandatory sector targets for diversity. Securing a plentiful supply of diverse, skilled talent is business-critical for an industry reliant on a largely freelance workforce. It is a crucial enabler to innovation, harnessing emerging technologies and remaining relevant to diverse global audiences. Increasing diversity and representation in TV/media also has a disproportionately positive social impact in terms of providing high-profile role models and multiple perspectives/voices to broader audiences. However, analysis of 1.1 million UK TV productions shows poor representation of disabled and ethnically diverse talent. Women are leaving the workforce in high numbers, heavily impacting on gender balance in senior and craft roles. (Diamond 6th Cut: Creative Diversity Network\_2023). All major UK broadcasters have introduced commissioning diversity targets to try to tackle these challenges at a sector level. BBC, Channel 4, ITV, Sky and BFI require gender balance and Global Ethnic Majority (GEM), disabled/neurodiverse, and working-class representation. In 2021, a £100k grant from Innovate UK (Sustainable Innovation Fund) funded the building and launch of Gritty Talent's inclusive talent matching MVP. This fully functional app for on-screen talent from under-represented groups enables industry decision makers to access talent profiles and make contact. Since then the team has conducted extensive market research with clients and wider sector stakeholders. This has led to developing tools to help creative sector suppliers assess and act on their diversity and inclusion gaps more effectively. This project will develop an AI-enabled process to improve GT's current EDI workflow. Enabling the partnership with Netflix supplier Floating Harbour Studios ensures that the system fully considers stakeholder needs providing a unique opportunity to drive a step-change in productivity for clients, who must deliver regardless of external economic pressures on the sector commitment to improve meaningful diversity and inclusion.

The aim of this project is to create an online networked industry that augments the face-to-face networking within the media sector when discovering and commissioning new and diverse creative talent. TV/film commissioners and production companies have long struggled with easy access to fresh, diverse talent and so rely on agents, development producers, networking events and often word of mouth to bring forward talent for both on and off-screen roles. During the aftermath of Covid-19 and beyond this technology will recreate the serendipity that happens 'on the ground' when people meet at networking events/conferences, while going one step further and creating introductions which may not have happened in the real world due to both existing and new structural barriers (travel, cost, availability, visibility, unconscious bias, professional network bubbles etc).