If you have interviewed for a job recently and felt like you were talking to a screen rather than a person, you may not have been wrong. AI-led interviews have become common enough, and undisclosed enough, that most candidates are going in blind.
How common this actually is
According to Greenhouse's 2026 Candidate AI Interview Report, a survey of 2,950 candidates across the UK, US, Germany, Australia and Ireland, 63% of job seekers have now been interviewed by AI in some form, up 13 percentage points from six months earlier. Among UK jobseekers specifically, 47% reported being interviewed by AI.
The bigger issue is not that AI is involved. It is that candidates usually do not know until they are already in it.
- 82% of UK jobseekers were not informed beforehand that AI would be involved in their interview.
- 24% only realised once the interview had already started.
- Only 10% said their prospective employer had a clear, visible policy on how AI is used in hiring.
Why this is changing how candidates behave
The consequences of that lack of transparency are measurable, not just a matter of candidates feeling uneasy.
Across the full survey, 30% of candidates said they had withdrawn from a hiring process once they discovered AI was involved, and 38% said an AI interview experience made them walk away from that employer specifically. Some of this comes down to fairness concerns: 27% of UK respondents reported experiencing what they believed was age bias during an AI interview, and 17% reported race or ethnicity bias.
None of this means candidates are opposed to AI outright. Only 19% wanted it removed altogether. What they consistently asked for instead was control and visibility: 45% wanted the option of a human interviewer, 40% wanted clear disclosure upfront, and 28% wanted evidence that the tool had actually been audited for bias.
What to actually do about it
You cannot always avoid an AI-led interview, but you can go in prepared rather than caught out.
Ask directly, before you accept the interview slot. "Will any part of this process involve AI-based assessment or scoring?" is now a completely reasonable question to put to a recruiter or hiring contact. Given that 82% of UK candidates were not told, asking is currently the only reliable way to find out.
Assume you are being scored on structure, not just content. AI interview tools generally assess clarity, specificity and consistency more heavily than a human interviewer might. Vague, rambling answers are penalised more sharply. Structuring your answers, situation, action, result, in that order, tends to score better regardless of who or what is listening.
Treat a flat, unresponsive interviewer as a signal, not a problem with you. An AI interviewer will not nod, laugh, or visibly react. That is normal, not a sign you are doing badly. Do not slow down or start over because the reaction you expected did not come.
Ask what happens next, and who reviews the output. A reasonable, well-run process still has a human making the final call. If nobody can tell you who reviews an AI interview's output, that itself is useful information about how seriously the employer has thought this through.
The wider point
Interview processes are changing faster than most candidates' expectations of them. The gap between what is actually happening in a hiring process and what a candidate assumes is happening is exactly where anxiety and underperformance both creep in.
Knowing what to expect, and being able to prepare for the actual format rather than a guessed one, is part of what Karro's career intelligence is built to help with, alongside a clearer read on how your CV and profile land before you even get to interview stage. Going in informed beats going in hopeful.