SAN FRANCISCO, CA – [Date] – Ten years ago, Eightfold AI was founded on a deceptively simple yet profoundly ambitious vision: to ensure the right career for everyone in the world. This foundational principle emerged from a persistent paradox observed by its co-founder, Ashutosh Garg. On one hand, hiring managers expressed frustration at their inability to find qualified candidates. On the other, talented individuals struggled to discover suitable career opportunities. This disconnect highlighted a systemic failure in connecting talent with opportunity, a gap Eightfold aimed to bridge through intelligent technology.
The significance of this mission extends far beyond mere employment. A career profoundly shapes an individual’s ability to provide for their family, find personal fulfillment, build self-confidence, and ultimately construct the life they aspire to live. Yet, traditional decision-making processes in talent acquisition often fell short, demonstrating a limited understanding of an individual’s full potential and capacity for growth. Resume-driven hiring, a long-standing practice, primarily served to filter large volumes of applicants, rather than to identify nascent potential or transferable skills. It could illustrate a candidate’s past experiences but offered little insight into their learning agility, adjacent skill sets, or future areas of success.
Garg’s personal trajectory provided a strong foundation for this endeavor. His prior experience at Google and as co-founder of BloomReach involved extensive work in personalization, search, ranking, and recommendation systems. This expertise was complemented by Eightfold co-founder Varun Kacholia’s deep understanding of large-scale recommendation systems, honed through his work at Facebook and YouTube. Together, they recognized that advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI), which had become remarkably adept at understanding relevance and leveraging vast datasets to predict user preferences, could be applied to a domain of far greater consequence: an individual’s career trajectory.
This led to a fundamental reorientation in how talent was perceived and managed. The focus shifted from static elements like job titles and resumes to a dynamic understanding of skills, learnability, career progression, and latent potential. This represented a pivotal evolution from a system fixated on past accomplishments to one capable of discerning future capabilities. Crucially, Eightfold recognized that recruiting, internal mobility, learning and development, and workforce planning were not discrete challenges but interconnected facets of a holistic talent ecosystem, all underpinned by a profound understanding of what individuals can do today and what they can evolve into tomorrow.
This philosophy became the bedrock of Eightfold AI. Rather than retrofitting AI into existing human resources workflows, the company’s approach was to prioritize intelligence itself, exploring the transformative possibilities it could unlock.
A Decade of Transformative Innovation
Over the past ten years, Eightfold’s innovation has been consistently driven by the application of AI advancements to expand human and organizational potential. What began as a singular idea has blossomed into a global enterprise. From its humble beginnings in a small space in Sunnyvale, California, Eightfold has experienced significant growth, now serving a clientele that includes one-third of Fortune 500 companies. The company has also seen a remarkable quadrupling of new customers for its agentic products in the current year alone, underscoring the accelerating adoption of its next-generation AI solutions.
Eightfold’s Talent Intelligence Platform now operates at an enterprise scale, unifying recruiting, internal mobility, skills management, and workforce planning under a cohesive framework that prioritizes a deep understanding of individuals and their potential. The sheer scale of its operations is a testament to the expansive reach of its original vision. The belief that AI could fundamentally alter how organizations perceive talent is now being implemented across 155 countries and supports up to 30 languages, demonstrating its global applicability and impact. For Garg, this widespread adoption represents the most meaningful metric of success: not merely the company’s growth, but the increasing number of individuals and organizations benefiting from its technology.
A core lesson learned throughout this journey is that technology’s true value lies in its ability to create tangible benefits for users. Early customers placed their trust in Eightfold’s vision, and the company’s primary objective was their success. This necessitated active listening, a willingness to acknowledge and correct flawed assumptions, and a relentless pursuit of improvement. While the overarching mission provided direction, the tangible outcomes achieved by customers instilled the discipline required to transform ambitious ideas into a robust and thriving company.
From its inception, Eightfold acknowledged the profound responsibility associated with applying AI to the critical domain of employment. The principle of Responsible AI was not an afterthought to be integrated once the technology reached maturity; it has been a foundational element of the company’s architecture from day one. Transparency, robust governance, and human accountability are intrinsically woven into the design and deployment of its AI systems. At Eightfold, trust and innovation have always been inextricably linked, progressing hand-in-hand.
The Dawn of Agentic AI and the Rise of TalentForge
The company is now at another pivotal inflection point, as AI transitions from simply understanding and recommending to actively taking action. Agentic AI represents a paradigm shift, enabling AI systems to directly participate in work, execute tasks, and augment human capabilities, moving beyond mere information provision. For Eightfold, this opens up a new frontier in how intelligence can revolutionize the execution of work.
The same principle that guided Eightfold from its inception – leveraging intelligence to perceive possibilities that traditional systems overlook – is now extending beyond talent decisions to encompass how organizations design and construct the very systems through which work is accomplished.
TalentForge, a new offering from Eightfold, embodies this next evolutionary leap. For much of the history of enterprise software, organizations have adopted pre-defined applications, configuring them to their specific needs and often adapting their internal processes to align with the software’s capabilities. AI is now beginning to invert this relationship. We are entering an era where organizations can architect software around their unique people, data, workflows, and operational methodologies.
This paradigm shift from primarily purchasing enterprise software to actively building the software an organization requires holds the potential to fundamentally reshape the enterprise technology landscape. AI democratizes software creation, accelerating the pace at which it can be developed and enabling continuous evolution. Eightfold’s journey began by reimagining how organizations understand talent through AI; now, the company is instrumental in redefining the software that underpins how work is performed.
This next phase of Eightfold’s development necessitates a builder’s mindset, a characteristic that makes the appointment of Joe Korngiebel as the company’s new CEO particularly significant. Korngiebel brings three decades of experience in building enterprise HR technology, combining a sharp product vision with a deep respect for customers. His understanding of how to translate significant technological shifts into practical, effective products for complex global organizations makes him ideally suited for this leadership role. As Eightfold embarks on its next phase of building, Korngiebel’s blend of product foresight, enterprise acumen, and customer-centricity positions him as the right leader for the challenges and opportunities ahead.
Korngiebel steps into a leadership team that has been strategically evolving to meet the demands of this new chapter. Amber Grewal, Chief Customer & Growth Officer, brings extensive experience in talent transformation and driving organizational growth. Jason Gorski, Chief Sales Officer, contributes over two decades of expertise in building and scaling enterprise sales organizations. The synergy within this team, comprising both builders and operators who possess a keen understanding of emerging technologies and the practicalities of delivering customer value, provides Eightfold with the leadership necessary to sustain innovation, deepen customer partnerships, and translate future possibilities into sustained growth.
Garg expressed confidence that some of Eightfold’s most impactful innovations are yet to come, citing the company’s technological prowess, strong leadership, and dedicated team as key drivers for pushing the boundaries of what is possible. The increasing complexity of the challenges presented by its customers continues to propel Eightfold’s commitment to building, learning, and raising its own standards.
Charting the Future of Work
The coming decade promises to be even more transformative than the last. AI is rapidly evolving from a tool for understanding the world to one that actively helps us shape it. Its capabilities now extend to taking on work, generating software, coordinating complex tasks, and equipping individuals with competencies that previously required large teams or highly specialized expertise. This evolution is poised to loosen many of the long-standing constraints that have dictated how companies organize work for decades.
This presents an extraordinary opportunity to reimagine the very nature of work. The future of employment should not merely involve layering automation onto existing job structures. Instead, AI offers the potential to fundamentally redesign work itself. By assuming the burden of repetitive execution, AI can free up human energy and time, allowing individuals to focus more intensely on critical areas such as judgment, creativity, interpersonal relationships, and the resolution of complex, impactful problems. This shift will empower smaller teams to achieve outcomes previously requiring larger organizations and provide individuals with access to capabilities that were once out of reach.
For organizational leaders, this necessitates a recalibration of their strategic mindset. Traditional workforce planning has predominantly commenced with job roles and headcount. AI fundamentally alters this equation, enabling organizations to begin with desired outcomes and then determine how human talent and AI can collaborate synergistically to achieve them. Organizations that embrace this fundamental shift will not only achieve greater efficiency but will also be empowered to envision entirely novel modes of operation.
Ten years of building Eightfold have underscored a crucial realization: technology alone does not forge the future. While AI can illuminate possibilities, it is ultimately people and organizations that must act upon them. This requires a willingness to rethink established processes, cultivate new skills, make deliberate strategic decisions, and maintain unwavering accountability for the ethical and effective utilization of technology. The optimistic future envisioned is not one led by machines, but rather one that is human-led and machine-scaled.
It is with this forward-looking perspective that Ashutosh Garg announced his transition, handing the leadership baton to Joe Korngiebel. Garg expressed his conviction that Korngiebel’s extensive experience in enterprise HR technology, profound product judgment, and deep customer empathy make him the ideal leader for Eightfold’s next chapter. Garg will continue to support the company’s trajectory from his new role as Chairman of the Board.
When Varun Kacholia and Garg embarked on their entrepreneurial journey with Eightfold, their ambition was clear: to facilitate the right career for every individual globally. A decade later, the realized possibilities far exceed their initial imaginings. Eightfold remains committed to its core mission, continually innovating, building, and driving forward toward the next frontier of what is possible.
