The Platform Chronicles: 10 Questions with Kamal Ahluwalia, President, Eightfold AI
Eightfold wants to enable “Right Career for Everyone in the World” — a potential trillion-dollar market.
Welcome to The Platform Chronicles, a publication designed to introduce readers to some of the most innovative partners and customers using Salesforce products.
This issue introduces Kamal Ahluwalia and Eightfold AI. We’re pleased to showcase the compelling story of a Salesforce customer.
10 Questions for Kamal
Kamal brings extensive experience in creating software categories, scaling global businesses, and applying “Extreme Ownership” to every opportunity. During his time as Chief Revenue Officer at Apttus, Kamal led the company to market leadership in multiple product categories ahead of many well-known market leaders. He is co-author of the book “What’s Next for You — The Eightfold Path To Transforming The Way We Hire And Manage Talent”.
The company’s name is inspired by the Buddhist Eightfold Path to Nirvana. Kamal and team believe that everyone has the right to choose how they want to earn their living — their career path: “We should be good at unlearning and learning — and today “learnability” is the single most important capability we can have — because skills can get outdated within 4–5 years.”
The following is a lightly-edited transcript of our ten questions for Kamal.
Question #1
Kamal, can you tell us more about what attracted you to Eightfold?
Having been in high tech in Silicon Valley for 30 years, I’ve always been a bit obsessed about finding and retaining talent.
A couple of years ago I met the founders of this AI company who had left Google and Facebook to start Eightfold. We have created the first Talent Intelligence Platform to enable companies to manage the entire talent life cycle. We marry the data available inside the enterprise with what is available outside — with all the privacy and governance guardrails — to transparently allow the employees and outside candidates to grow with the company.
“We should be good at unlearning and learning.”
Salesforce talks about creating a 360-degree view of the customer — we want to provide a 360-degree view of the talent to both the company and the individual.
CEOs tell us that they need to first know what their employees are capable of doing today so that the right talent strategy can be deployed around reskilling/upskilling or going outside to acquire new talent.
Question #2
Eightfold has an ambitious mission to enable the “Right Career for Everyone in the World.” How far along are you in the journey?
We understand that it’s a big goal, but we have an incredible opportunity ahead of us. We believe the world at large is at an inflection point: societally and technologically, we’re ready to embrace a true sea change in how careers begin and, just as importantly, evolve. This also includes how we empower our employees to pursue a career of their choice — within our organizations.
We came out of stealth mode in 2018. Today, we are in 26 countries on 4 continents. We have customers spread across 110 countries. We also support 15 languages.
“Salesforce talks about creating a 360-degree view of the customer — we want to provide a 360-degree view of the talent to both the company and the individual.”
A few weeks ago on Friday, September 18th, the U.S. Department of Labor declared us the winner of the Veterans Employment Challenge. We beat out 50 other vendors, including Square Peg and LinkedIn, to match transitioning veterans’ capabilities to employer needs. To put this in perspective, veterans represent 5–6% of the US workforce today. Using our AI platform to help them with their career transition is a great way for us to thank them for their service.
The journey has been very rewarding so far. Flattening the unemployment curve caused by COVID, improving Diversity, Equality & Inclusion (DEI), helping employers grow their talent better, helping individuals pursue a career of their choice — this is a trillion-dollar opportunity.
Question #3
Kamal, you sent me your book along with the first resume ever written — Leonardo Da Vinci’s resume. It’s a clever marketing move, but why is it relevant today?
We all recognize Da Vinci to be a genius — well ahead of his time. But, if you read his resume, he doesn’t call out his own brilliance. Towards the end of that one-page resume, he humbly says — I can paint as well. Nothing in there says that centuries after I am gone, you all will line up to watch my masterful creations.
So, why do we expect us lesser mortals to capture our strengths in 1–2 pages? Today, resumes are useless and job descriptions are even worse. It’s time for us to recognize that. We’re leveraging AI to “see” what people are capable of doing. There are more Da Vincis amongst us.
Question #4
I love that last thought. How are companies finding their Da Vincis?
Today, talent is a CEO problem—not just an HR or Employee Success problem. As companies get past the 5,000 or 10,000 employee threshold, CEOs lose track of what their employees are capable of doing. They don’t know what skills they have acquired at work or how to set them up for success or give them career options. The old “who you know” vs. what you know does not work in a society that is demanding equality and inclusion.
“Why do we expect us lesser mortals to capture our strengths in 1–2 pages?”
In the age of AI, we want to help the companies and employees together. Each of our jobs will change. For better or worse, COVID has accelerated this transformation. We want to provide an easier path for every individual to develop new capabilities, learn from other people’s career paths, and stay relevant and aligned with the company’s direction.
We’re doing this in a self-service fashion. Explore new paths. Learn from mentors. Build new capabilities — without a top-down mandate or the fear of immediate managers.
Let’s take Salesforce. You now have 50,000+ employees. Your talent network should be about 200 times your number of employees — approximately 10 million people. This would represent everyone who wants to work for you, and everyone you would like to hire. And you should be able to compare every open role at Salesforce to every single person in your Talent Network — and find the best talent for every role. You might want to give more opportunities to employees first or focus on providing more opportunities to diverse candidates.
With your current systems, you can‘t. With Eightfold AI — you can.
Question #5
Getting back to COVID, how has the pandemic impacted your plans?
Like every company, it has impacted us in multiple ways.
As we were all going to lockdown at home in March, we got an inquiry from McKinsey & Company asking us if we could change our platform to help impacted companies and individuals. Within a couple of hours, we jumped into it. Our team worked non-stop across three continents to launch the Talent Exchange in April. (You can see the participating members here — https://eightfold.ai/talent-exchange/) .
“Today, talent is a CEO problem — not just an HR or Employee Success problem.”
This has grown tremendously to help companies, individuals, schools, associations so that we can flatten the unemployment curve as well. Along the way, our platform evolved a lot, covering a much broader spectrum of workforce, jobs, and industries. At last glance, there are currently more than 700,000 job openings for 1,000+ roles.
We are seeing more companies and C-suite invest more in their employees. The adoption of AI has accelerated due to severe business disruption. Likewise, executives are pushing to rethink what needs to be done by humans and what can be automated. CEOs are also seeking ways to continue to innovate as employees stay home or slowly return to the office.
Question #6
People reading this might associate the Talent Exchange to LinkedIn. Can you tell us more about the Talent Exchange?
Talent Exchange was created to flatten the unemployment curve. Today we have companies, individuals, trade associations, universities — Starbucks, Amazon, Hyatt, Walmart, Macy's, Postmates, United Airlines, etc. all participating. We have jobs across 6,000 cities in 50 states and Canada.
“Executives are pushing to rethink what needs to be done by humans and what can be automated.”
Let me tell you about Joshua. He was working at a Starbucks in Philadelphia. He got hit with a double whammy. First, his hours got reduced. Then, his store was closed indefinitely. Starbucks shared Eightfold Talent Exchange with Joshua and other impacted employees to help them find other opportunities. Joshua created his profile on our Talent Exchange, saw some matches, gave more details, and found a handful of jobs that were compelling to him. He applied to Walgreens, heard back in two days, interviewed, and within a week had started onboarding in a Manager role.
Right Career for Everyone in the World. Bruce — you and I can do this.
Question #7
Like many companies, Salesforce has a big focus on DE&I. How can Eightfold AI help all of us become more diverse?
First — our algorithms comply with Equal Opportunity algorithms. So age, sex, pedigree, race, etc. are not included in the match score — making it a level playing field for everyone.
Then let’s start with how you are calibrating the job description. Ensure that the requirements are not a laundry list or a cut-and-paste job from other job descriptions — this can stack the deck against diversity candidates.
Anonymize all profiles for review, selection, etc. so that everyone gets a fair shot and people are selected based on their capabilities.
“Right Career for Everyone in the World.”
Use Diversity Dashboards that show where bias may be creeping in. Human psychology — whatever is inspected — improves. We can be very granular, right down to every recruiter and every hiring manager.
Also, transparency of AI matching to candidates and hiring manager — why someone is a good fit and for employees, how they can learn missing capabilities. Building a culture of learning new skills — all the time. And if you are an expert, helping others become experts.
Question #8
Earlier you referenced the deal you won against 50 other vendors. The HR market is a crowded, fragmented sector with some large players. How is Eightfold different?
The market is littered with point solutions. That old adage that “features become companies” certainly applies here.
Legacy incumbents are largely process applications. They focus more on managing a process versus solving for the needs of their stakeholders — employees and the business.
As a result of the point solutions, HR organizations and their tech stacks are siloed as well. Hundreds of billions of dollars are spent or wasted on ineffective pursuits and programs.
We have built a single AI-powered platform for hiring, retaining, and growing a diverse organization. Everything is data-driven — so it’s learning every day and getting better every day.
Our team is from Google, YouTube, and Facebook — so they know search, relevance, and personalization extremely well. We want to apply our expertise to the service of people.
Question #9
How do you enable companies to “Hire for Potential”?
We have built a Capability Matrix that allows us to accurately predict what an individual is capable of doing next. Skills get outdated quickly. So simply doing keyword, boolean searches across resumes, is essentially looking backwards — in the rearview mirror.
Our Capability Matrix is data-driven, learning and self-updating automatically, focused on learnability, captures the context, evolves with time, and adapts to the latest developments in tools and technology. This allows us to help our customers Hire for Potential. With confidence.
“Hundreds of billions of dollars are spent or wasted on ineffective pursuits and programs.”
By the way — “Hiring for Potential” is the ONLY way to become more diverse. If we keep looking for people who have already done it before, we will not become more diverse. And we need to unlock this for the companies and for the employees. Companies should be able to determine what an employee or outside candidate is capable of doing. And an individual should also be able to determine what they need to do or learn to pursue their aspirations.
Companies that use Assessments need to be very careful. Assessments are good for validation — bad for identification. If you are using assessment tools for identification — you are putting people in a box — and that is why our society is not diverse enough.
Question #10
Last question: You and Ashutosh Garg have already published the book “What’s Next For You.” It begs the question, “What’s next for Eightfold?”
The reason why we wrote the book so early in our journey is that we want everyone to think differently. Companies and individuals. Unlock more opportunities for employees within their current company. Inspire people to continue to learn new things. Stay relevant. With AI, we will get to transform how we work, how we grow talent, and how we grow talented teams.
“‘Hiring for Potential’ is the ONLY way to become more diverse. If we keep looking for people who have already done it before, we will not become more diverse.”
On our side — Talent Intelligence Platform for all use cases — adding support for contractors to our existing support for full-time and part-time workers. We’re going to extend the IP advantage we have in our AI platform. Besides the global coverage, we have clients in 17 industries — so our models are fairly accurate in understanding capabilities and skill adjacencies and transferability of skills to other roles. And getting better.
Bruce, we just need your help in getting more organizations to rethink their Talent Strategy.
Thank you, Kamal. We wish you continued success.
About Eightfold AI: Eightfold.ai® delivers the Talent Intelligence Platform™, the most effective way for companies to retain top performers, upskill and reskill the workforce, recruit top talent efficiently, and reach diversity goals. Eightfold.ai’s deep learning artificial intelligence platform empowers enterprises to turn talent management into a competitive advantage. In April 2020, Eightfold.ai launched Talent Exchange, a place to help all companies and individuals impacted by COVID-19 to flatten the unemployment curve.
