Sunnyvale, CA – October 26, 2023 – Ten years ago, a foundational concept was born with the ambitious aim of ensuring the right career for every individual worldwide. This vision, articulated by the founders of Eightfold AI, stemmed from a stark observation of a disconnect in the labor market: hiring managers struggling to find qualified talent, while simultaneously, skilled professionals faced difficulties in discovering suitable career opportunities. This paradox highlighted a systemic inefficiency in connecting talent with opportunity, a challenge that Eightfold AI set out to address through the transformative power of artificial intelligence.
The genesis of Eightfold AI can be traced to the profound impact employment has on an individual’s life, extending far beyond mere financial compensation. A career is intrinsically linked to a person’s ability to support a family, find personal fulfillment, cultivate self-assurance, and ultimately, construct the life they aspire to lead. Traditional hiring methodologies, however, often proved insufficient in capturing the full spectrum of an individual’s capabilities and potential. Resumes, while providing a historical overview, often failed to illuminate latent skills, the capacity for learning new competencies, or the adjacent roles where an individual might excel.
The core team behind Eightfold AI brought a wealth of experience in personalization, search, ranking, and recommendation systems, honed at leading technology companies. Ashutosh Garg, co-founder and former CEO, previously contributed to advancements at Google and co-founded BloomReach. His co-founder, Varun Kacholia, possessed extensive expertise in building large-scale recommendation engines for platforms like Facebook and YouTube. This collective background instilled a deep understanding of how to leverage vast datasets to identify relevance and anticipate future needs. The conviction was that these sophisticated AI capabilities could be redirected towards a far more consequential domain: shaping and advancing individual careers.
This strategic pivot necessitated a departure from conventional metrics like job titles and static resumes. The focus shifted towards a holistic understanding of an individual’s skills, their inherent learnability, their career trajectories, and their untapped potential. The fundamental transformation involved moving from a system that primarily evaluated past accomplishments to one that could proactively identify future capabilities. Furthermore, Eightfold recognized that recruitment, internal mobility, employee development, and strategic workforce planning were not isolated challenges but rather interconnected facets of a larger talent ecosystem, all reliant on a profound understanding of an individual’s current abilities and their potential for growth. This realization formed the bedrock of Eightfold’s operational philosophy. Instead of retrofitting AI into existing HR workflows, the company prioritized building intelligence from the ground up, focusing on the expansive possibilities it could unlock.
A Decade of Pioneering Innovation and Global Expansion
Over the past ten years, Eightfold AI’s commitment to innovation has been consistently driven by the application of cutting-edge AI to broaden the horizons for both individuals and organizations. What began as a focused endeavor to comprehend human potential has evolved into a global enterprise. From its humble beginnings in a modest space in Sunnyvale, California, Eightfold AI has experienced significant growth, now serving a substantial clientele that includes a third of Fortune 500 companies. Notably, the adoption of its agentic products has seen a remarkable quadrupling in the current year alone.
The company’s flagship offering, Talent Intelligence, now operates at an enterprise scale, unifying critical HR functions such as recruitment, internal mobility, skills management, and workforce planning around a sophisticated understanding of individuals and their potential. The sheer scale of this operation underscores the remarkable journey of Eightfold’s foundational concept. Initially rooted in the belief that AI could fundamentally alter how organizations perceive and manage talent, the platform now extends its reach across 155 countries and supports an impressive array of 30 languages. For Garg, this global footprint represents the most meaningful metric of success, signifying not just the company’s expansion but the increasing number of people and organizations empowered by its technology.
A key lesson learned throughout this journey has been the paramount importance of delivering tangible value to users. In the nascent stages, early adopters placed their trust in Eightfold’s vision. The company’s primary mandate was to ensure their success, which necessitated diligent listening, a willingness to acknowledge and rectify flawed assumptions, and a relentless pursuit of improvement. While the overarching mission provided direction, the concrete outcomes achieved by customers instilled the discipline required to transform ambitious aspirations into a thriving enterprise.
From its inception, Eightfold AI acknowledged the profound responsibility associated with applying AI to the critical domain of employment. The principle of Responsible AI was not an afterthought but an integral component of the company’s architectural design from day one. This commitment is manifested in the embedded principles of transparency, robust governance, and human accountability within its AI development and deployment processes. Trust and innovation, therefore, have always been viewed as interdependent forces at Eightfold.
The Dawn of Agentic AI and Enterprise Software Redefined
The company stands at another significant inflection point, with AI capabilities advancing beyond mere understanding and recommendation to actively participating in and executing tasks. Agentic AI represents a new frontier, where AI systems can directly engage in work, performing tasks and augmenting human capabilities to achieve greater outcomes, rather than solely providing information. This evolution opens up novel avenues for intelligence to fundamentally reshape how work is accomplished within organizations.
The core principle that guided Eightfold from its inception – leveraging intelligence to perceive possibilities overlooked by traditional systems – now extends beyond talent management into the very design and construction of enterprise software. Eightfold’s latest offering, TalentForge, embodies this next evolutionary leap. For much of the history of enterprise software, organizations have relied on pre-defined applications, adapting their internal processes to conform to software capabilities. AI is now reversing this dynamic, ushering in an era where organizations can build bespoke software solutions tailored precisely to their unique people, data, workflows, and operational methodologies.
This paradigm shift, from primarily purchasing off-the-shelf software to building custom solutions, is poised to fundamentally reshape the enterprise technology landscape. AI is democratizing software creation, accelerating development cycles, and enabling continuous evolution of these platforms. Eightfold’s journey, which began with rethinking talent management through AI, now extends to reimagining the very fabric of enterprise software through which work is executed.
Leadership Transition: Charting the Course for Future Growth
This next phase of Eightfold’s trajectory necessitates a builder’s mindset, a quality that makes Joe Korngiebel an ideal leader to guide the company forward. With three decades of experience in developing enterprise HR technology, Korngiebel possesses a potent combination of visionary product strategy and a profound respect for customer needs. His deep understanding of how to translate significant technological shifts into practical, impactful products for complex global organizations positions him perfectly for Eightfold’s evolving needs.
Korngiebel assumes leadership of a team that has been strategically shaped for this next chapter. Amber Grewal, Chief Customer & Growth Officer, brings extensive expertise in talent transformation and driving organizational growth. Jason Gorski, Chief Sales Officer, contributes over two decades of experience in building and scaling enterprise sales organizations. The collective strength of this leadership team lies in its blend of builders and operators who possess both a keen understanding of emerging technological trends and a proven ability to deliver demonstrable value to customers. Together, they provide Eightfold with the strategic direction necessary to sustain innovation, deepen customer partnerships, and translate future possibilities into tangible growth.
The Future of Work: Human-Led, Machine-Scaled
Looking ahead, the next decade is anticipated to be even more transformative than the last. AI is rapidly evolving from a tool for understanding the world to an active participant within it. Its capacity to undertake work, generate software, coordinate tasks, and equip individuals with capabilities previously requiring large teams or specialized expertise is expanding exponentially. This presents an extraordinary opportunity to dismantle long-standing constraints that have shaped organizational structures for decades.
The future of work need not be confined to automating existing jobs; it presents an opportunity to fundamentally redesign work itself. AI can assume a greater portion of repetitive tasks, freeing human capital to focus on higher-order activities such as critical judgment, creativity, relationship building, and problem-solving. This will enable smaller teams to achieve outcomes previously requiring much larger workforces, and individuals will gain access to capabilities that were once beyond their reach.
For organizational leaders, this necessitates a recalibration of strategic thinking. Traditional workforce planning has been anchored in jobs and headcount. AI fundamentally alters this equation, enabling a shift in focus towards desired organizational outcomes and the synergistic collaboration between human and artificial intelligence to achieve them. Organizations that embrace this paradigm shift will not only achieve greater efficiency but will also unlock entirely new modes of operation.
Ten years of building Eightfold have underscored a crucial insight: technology alone does not engineer the future. While AI can illuminate possibilities, it is human agency and organizational commitment that ultimately drive action. This involves a willingness to rethink established processes, cultivate new skills, make informed decisions, and maintain accountability for the ethical and effective deployment of technology. The optimistic future envisioned is not one dictated by machines, but rather one that is human-led and machine-scaled.
It is with this compelling future in sight that Ashutosh Garg has transitioned leadership to Joe Korngiebel. Korngiebel’s extensive background in enterprise HR technology, his sharp product acumen, and his deep-seated respect for customers make him the ideal leader for Eightfold’s next chapter. Garg will continue to support the company in his new capacity as Chairman of the Board.
When Varun Kacholia and Ashutosh Garg embarked on their journey with Eightfold, they were driven by an ambitious vision: the right career for everyone in the world. A decade later, the realized possibilities far exceed their initial imaginings. Eightfold AI remains at the forefront of innovation, continuously building and pushing the boundaries of what is achievable in the evolving landscape of work.
