Karat has introduced Karat NextGen, a new human-led, AI-enabled interview solution designed to assess software engineers who can thrive in a world where human judgment and artificial intelligence operate side by side. Positioned as the industry’s first evaluation model built specifically for the human + AI era, the platform seeks to address widening gaps in how organizations hire engineering talent amid rapid advances in generative AI.
The launch follows findings from Karat’s 2025–2026 AI Workforce Transformation Report, which anticipates the ROI of high-performing engineers will triple within three years due to AI-driven productivity gains. Nearly 70% of engineering leaders aim to deepen their AI capabilities through hiring, yet many companies still rely on outdated evaluation methods—two-thirds restrict AI use in interviews, and fewer than a third have modernized assessments to identify AI-ready candidates.
“Most companies are still hiring based on a pre-LLM rubric. In a world where people and AI work together, engineers need a wider range of skills, and the way we evaluate those skills needs to adapt,” said Jeffrey Spector, co-founder and president at Karat. “Karat NextGen reimagines the technical interview to mirror the way humans and AI work together, producing the strongest hiring signal and arming CTOs, CIOs, and VPs of Engineering with the data and benchmarks they need to make their most important talent decisions.”
Karat builds on a dataset of more than 600,000 interviews, enabling the new solution to reflect evolving AI capabilities and engineering practices. NextGen Interviews immerse candidates in realistic development environments where they tackle complex, multi-file tasks using an integrated AI assistant while collaborating with Karat’s expert Interview Engineers. This structure is designed to evaluate reasoning, decision-making, and problem-solving beyond what AI tools alone can generate.
As AI reshapes software development, industry leaders emphasize the urgency of updating hiring models. “AI is transforming engineering, but the real breakthroughs happen when human judgment and AI capabilities work together,” said Sagnik Nandy, CTO at DocuSign. “A human-led, AI-native interview is exactly the kind of solution organizations need to understand who can truly excel in this new model of development.”
