Ashutosh Garg is CEO and Co-founder at Eightfold.ai. He has >6000 research citations, 50+ patents, 35+ peer-reviewed research publications, and the outstanding Ph.D. thesis award from UIUC for his Ph.D. thesis in Machine Learning.
Eightfold.ai recently completed a $28 million Series C with participation from IVP, Foundation Capital and Lightspeed Ventures. Namagiri Anand interacted with Ashutosh Garg to get insights on his latest mission, focused on talent intelligence, and essentially helping talent find meaningful work possibilities.
Namagiri: What is Eightfold.ai? How did you embark on this role?
Ashutosh: Every society needs 3 strong foundations for people to thrive - education, employment and healthcare. Eightfold is applying AI to solve employment. This is what drove me to create Eightfold with a singular focus on helping people with their careers. Eightfold is all about predicting “what’s next” for individuals and connecting employers with the most qualified applicants. We’ve invented the first Talent Intelligence Platform, an AI-powered platform built for enterprises to address talent acquisition and diversity and talent management in a holistic manner.
Namagiri: Talk to us about the Eightfold.ai's Talent Intelligence Platform (TIP).
Ashutosh: Today the market is littered with point solutions - some manual and some that use technology. Today every company needs to account for all current applicants, employee referrals, university recruiting, passive candidates, diversity recruiting, internal mobility for employees, agency recruiting, and something that everyone ignores - past applicants and company alumni. Now - if you have point solutions for each of these hiring and retention channels, then all you have is a mess for the CHRO and CEO who are held accountable for building and growing a diverse and highly differentiated organization. With our Talent Intelligence Platform we provide a comprehensive talent network unique to an enterprise by aggregating all internal and external data for that enterprise – from applicants to alumni. The platform continuously learns from all the data, engagement and decisions in the enterprise to predict future roles and career alternatives.
We’ve also launched the first-ever AI-powered career site that leverages the matching technology from the Talent Intelligence Platform to create a personalized candidate experience for candidates. Instead of the candidate trying to figure out which job is best fit for them (and usually 60% of online applicants apply to the wrong job) - the Talent Intelligence Platform recommends the best fit jobs AND explains “why”. Companies with well known brands usually get hundreds of thousands of applicants every year - most ignored by recruiters due to high volume. Until now. With the Eightfold Talent Intelligence Platform matching is instant for both the applicant and the hiring manager - transforming the candidate experience. This transparency is proving out to be an excellent catalyst for diversity - because more women are applying to some of our customers who are already live with PCS.
Our customers are realizing impressive outcomes including 80% recruiter time savings, 200% increase in qualified candidates and a 19% increase in hiring of women.
Namagiri: From your perspective, how do you envision the future of work being shaped by AI and ML?
Ashutosh: There are several ways that artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies will impact the future of work. I’ll dive into a couple examples.
One way that AI will affect the future of work is by creating a more informed, data-driven HR function. AI can be used as a tool to help identify the best candidates for any given job, and can scale talent operations in order to consider every single applicant every time for every job. A company going from 10,000 to 20,000 employees, with 15-20% attrition, over four years will interview 200,000 people and review four million resumes. For larger organizations like this, it’s simply impossible to read every single resume that comes through the pipeline, but companies that leverage AI platform across all hiring channels - including current employees - can narrow down the list of relevant candidates significantly.
Imagine a future where every employee is challenged in their role and understands the opportunities that lie ahead for them, based on their skills, experience and potential. Our mission at Eightfold is to create a more empowered workforce by enabling individuals to reach that full potential. In a world where organizations are able to identify “what’s next” for each of their employees, attrition will plummet.
Namagiri: Let me ask one last question: What’s the best advice you ever received?
Ashutosh: Muhammad Yunus, VC and entrepreneur, once said that hard work and money do not always go hand-in-hand. The ultimate idea of entrepreneurism is to give everybody purpose and a reason to work hard, something that encouraged me to build a platform that identifies potential in everybody.