ST. LOUIS — A Washington, D.C., startup is looking to hire local neurodivergent workers as it opens an office downtown, attracted to St. Louis by the promised growth of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency campus.

Founded in 2020, Enabled Intelligence is a data-labeling and AI innovation company that works with sensitive and classified government data sets.

Because of the work Enabled Intelligence is contracted to do, CEO Peter Kant said they’ve found that employees who are the best match for the job are often part of the neurodivergent community.

A large part of what Enabled Intelligence does is identify and label objects in photos, such as noting the number of jets in an aerial image. Kant said the company has found neurodivergent workers outperform neurotypical people in this work, thanks to skills in pattern recognition, puzzle-solving and deep focus.

The work, in part, is used to train artificial intelligence programs, he said.

“Most AI are trying to mimic human thought to a degree … and all human thought is not just Stanford engineers, software engineers,” Kant said. “Neurodiversity in its true nature is diversity of thought, diversity of thought process, so if we can recreate that with our labelers that means that we’re creating much stronger training data to create more reliable and resilient and helpful AI.”

Kant said that the company is currently recruiting for its new office through local universities, high schools and nonprofits. Last fall, the company attended a career fair at Harris-Stowe State University.

“The talent is here,” Kant said. “The community currently isn’t really tapping into that and so we see this as a ready-made population.”

Typically, job candidates complete an online practice data-labeling assessment and go through Enabled Intelligence’s geospatial data-labeling boot camps. Enabled Intelligence will create about 50 jobs in St. Louis, Kant said.

Enabled Intelligence’s St. Louis operations will open at T-Rex, an innovation and entrepreneur development center on Washington Avenue in downtown. The company builds and runs its offices to be as flexible with their workers as possible and cater to their needs — some employees work better late at night, some work best in the low light, some can’t concentrate unless it’s totally quiet and some may require fidget-spinners at desks, said Kant.

He likened it to basketball players Caitlin Clark or Angel Reese needing certain shoes or power bars to play.

“We don’t call that an accommodation.” Kant said. “The whole company is built to support the neurodiverse community.”

Enabled Intelligence will host its first area boot camp out of the T-Rex office next month.

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