How Miriam Haart’s life took another Unorthodox turn at a Tel Aviv AI startup

When she moved to Israel last August, author and researcher Shai Dekel approached her with the idea that would run ActionAI. He wanted to develop a more trustworthy AI platform, one that could independently interact with your computer – doing things such as sending emails, writing reports and designing websites, according to user instruction – but would also have the rare ability to say “I don’t know” when it didn’t.

“AI is very powerful and intelligent, but we don’t have that trust yet for AI to do things like spend our credit cards or book flights, and one of the reasons is something called AI hallucination: when AI makes up an incorrect answer to a request it can’t solve,” Haart says. “So we created a platform that gets around this limitation.”

Unlike most current AI models that give made-up answers rather than respond with transparent uncertainty, ActionAI’s model can pause its automations and defer to human explanations when it isn’t sure of an answer. And the company’s technology, which evaluates every decision against ground truth to catch potential errors, is being applied to more than personal admin: it’s already been adopted by the judicial court system of Ras al Khaimah in the United Arab Emirates to help judges draft verdicts for labour and rental court cases.

According to Haart, ActionAI’s decision process follows the same steps a judge would take to reach a verdict: it analyses previous decisions, assesses case documents and relevant contracts, and applies pre-defined legal logic.

Not only has this AI-assisted process been shown to save an average of 240 hours per verdict, but the automated decisions are proving 10 per cent more accurate than manually produced verdicts, according to ActionAI’s benchmarking.

“This reduces the need for appellate court intervention, which happens when there’s been improper judgment, so it saves money for the government in addition to saving time for the judges themselves,” Haart says.

While judges are still relied upon to review the AI verdicts before they’re filed, the technology does pose a long-term existential threat to their jobs, and to others like them. Haart says ethical considerations such as job displacement have been integral to the development of ActionAI’s technology, but she insists that over time, these innovations will create more opportunities than they take away.

“AI, yes, is going to change the job landscape. This happens when any new technology comes into play,” she says. “But what I’m building is a tool that enables people to make money in new ways by learning to create and build with AI. It’s kind of like Instagram: content creation became a very profitable industry that only started to exist in the past decade.
So AI, in my opinion, is similarly going to enable a new kind of businessperson, a new kind of creator that can profit from these AI systems.”

While there’s nothing unusual these days about creative technology emerging from Israel’s fruitful high-tech startup world, having a queer 26-year-old female CEO at the helm of one such startup is still anomalous. Fortunately for Haart, she hasn’t gone into the leadership role blind; she’s known what a female boss looks like for quite a while now, thanks to the years she spent observing her mother.

“So often I think, ‘What would my mom do in this situation?’” Haart says. “I grew up watching my mother be the CEO of a giant company. I sat in on meetings and saw how she handled conflict. That helps me a lot.”

Their industries may differ – her mum is a founder of several clothing brands and former CEO of talent agency Elite World Group but Haart says their management style is similar: “We have that Jewish motherly energy – like, I just want to make sure that all my employees are well fed, so I’m always increasing the budget for food in the offices.”

Now that she lives in Tel Aviv, Jewishness is the undercurrent to both her professional and her personal life, which is an expected joy for Haart. Growing up Orthodox, she identified as Jewish strictly in the context of religion – she had no concept of a “cultural” Jewish identity – so when she and her mother and siblings left their community in 2013, “I no longer felt Jewish,” Haart says.

It was through her relationship to Israel, beginning with a Birthright trip as a teenager, that Haart began to understand the “beauty and depth” of Jewish culture, which “allowed me to identify as Jewish again”. In the wake of October 7, her connection to that identity – and defiance against the rise of antisemitism – underwent a further transformation. Haart, who considers herself an “October 8 Jew”, became a advocate for Israel on social media, and though she says she lost long-term social media partnerships over her activism, it only made her more committed to the cause.

“Before that, I was always just talking about tech and feminism and being queer, but now that my Jewish identity was being attacked, I was like, ‘I’m a Jew, now fight me for that’, and I got super involved,” she says. “And that’s one of the reasons why I came to Israel, because I’m so connected now to my Jewish identity. I love hosting Shabbat in my apartment and just celebrating the holidays more openly. I’ve healed my religious trauma so it’s not triggering any more.”

Another benefit to life in Tel Aviv? She never feels excluded from queer spaces for being a Zionist.

In New York it was honestly terrible to be a queer Zionist person – I lost tons of friends in the community for supporting Israel

“It’s so nice being gay in Israel,” Haart says. “In New York it was honestly terrible to be a queer Zionist person – I lost tons of friends in the community for supporting Israel and advocating for peace in this region, all because of this anti-Israel ideology that’s forced on the queer community in the US. In Israel I noticed that the queer community doesn’t have their own specific ideology that you have to fit into.”

Haart has thought deeply about the West’s increasing tendency towards dogma, both within the queer community and outside of it. She gave a Ted Talk last year about the way rigid ideology stifles critical thinking, a theory she is more than willing to corroborate with her own story as a former Chasid, and one she’s been approached to write a book about.

Miriam at her Ted Talk in 2025[Missing Credit]

Maybe someday she will – she sure has the material for it – but right now, she has her hands full living out the high-tech dream she’s had since she was 13. For Haart, kickstarting ActionAI seems to have been part of the same journey of self-actualisation as moving to Israel: both endeavours read like an inevitable homecoming, a full-circle celebration of who Haart has always been. A creator, a trailblazer, a Jew.

“There is such a power in learning how to code and being in tech. If you believe that you can build anything, then you might be able to believe that you can build your own life and your own future,” Haart says. “I’ve always been following my heart. This is me following my heart.”