What’s Next for You

My name is Ashutosh Garg, and I am the Chief Executive Officer and Cofounder of Eightfold.ai. Eightfold’s patented artificial intelligence–based platform empowers enterprises to turn talent management into a competitive advantage. I’ve worked in Silicon Valley for decades, researching and implementing machine learning technology. Previously, I worked at Google for more than four years (which is eons in Silicon Valley!), where I led search and personalization efforts, and did the same for IBM. In 2009, I founded Bloomreach, a leading vendor for Digital Experience Platforms, aiming to optimize businesses’ online platforms to drive conversion. It’s no coincidence we’re working on this revolution in Silicon Valley. The tech capital of the world — perhaps best known for its innovative companies and a few genius startup founders who only wear T-shirts — has some of the highest attrition rates in the country. On average, employees stay fewer than two years, compared to the already low 4.2 years nationally. Throughout my career, I’ve witnessed this attrition firsthand. I realized something had to change. I decided to combine my knowledge of AI technology and experience building great teams to help people find meaningful work, and in turn reduce employee turnover. After meeting Varun Kacholia at Google, we decided to team up to create Eightfold. Varun is one of the world’s leaders when it comes to search, ranking, and machine-learning. He’s passionate about how AI can be applied to everyday life and really have a positive impact on people’s lives. Kamal Ahluwalia, president at Eightfold, joins me in writing this book. We wrote What’s Next For You for HR executives, C-suite executives, business owners, and job candidates. This book is for anyone and everyone who has hired or been hired by someone. We invite anyone concerned about the talent crisis to get engaged now in the solution. Indeed, you’re a vital part of our next steps forward. FINDING OUR POTENTIAL At Eightfold, we talk a lot about meaningful employment for everyone. We are talking about billions of jobs, billions of skills, billions of job titles, millions of career options, multiple geographies, industries, and languages. This is a problem worth solving that cannot be solved by individuals doing this manually or with archaic tools. It’s a problem that is set up perfectly for AI and machine learning — because there’s tons of data available about people, jobs, who companies do and don’t like to hire, and an employee’s own career trajectory, aspirations, competency and equivalency of skills, not to mention team environments where people tend to do well and those that could benefit from change. We have developed purpose-built models that enable us to make sense out of all this complex data and apply it to individual companies. While we talk a lot about matching people to jobs, the accuracy of these recommendations and being able to explain the results is the key to building confidence among HR leaders and candidates. Today, we can provide this transparency to both. And we can make a recommendation specific to a person. What is personally exciting for me and my team is to see how this can be applied to solve diversity and inclusion in our workforce. Yes, more and more CEOs genuinely care about diversity — and holding their teams accountable for it — and our platform can help them. Most books written by entrepreneurs are after the fact. They have built a successful company and are now ready to share their learnings with others. We want to encourage people to think differently about their talent problems right now. This change cannot and should not wait while Eightfold grows. We want more CEOs and CHROs to step back and rethink their talent strategy today. We know scale, because our past products are used everyday by billions of people worldwide. HOW TO READ THIS BOOK We’ve written this book to help you and your company be a part of the exciting transformation of talent acquisition and management happening right now. One by one, technology has revolutionized every industry. It started with transport during the industrial revolution, right to e-commerce with the rise of the internet. Up until now, hiring has remained largely untouched. Yes, computers and access to the internet have helped to simplify the application process for some, but the way we hire has remained stagnant for decades. What we’ve discovered by creating Eightfold changes everything. We want you to be a part of that change. This book is here to guide you through how we are revolutionizing human resources for good. Join us.