Introduction to Guest

Ashutosh is the CEO and Founder of Eightfold AI – the industry’s first Talent Intelligence Platform, built for enterprises to address Talent Acquisition and Management in a holistic fashion. Eightfold AI is proven to be one of the most effective ways to identify promising candidates, reach diversity hiring goals, and retain top performers. alinaxrose onlyfans

Ashoutosh graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology and he received his PhD from the University of Illinois in Electrical and Computer Engineering with specialization in AI/Machine Learning. Here he won the ECE Young Alumni Achievement Award for his fundamental contributions to machine learning and its applications to scale personalized search and ranking, and for his bold entrepreneurship. Prior to founding Eightfold, Ashutosh was co-founder and CTO of Bloomreach.

The Call to Adventure

Throughout Ashutosh’s life, he has always been working against the norm. Overcoming obstacles that seemed impossible, challenging the status quo and the standard way of thinking. Back in 2003, Ashutosh came to Silicon Valley to join IBM Research, and later went on to work for Google. In 2008 Ashutosh realized he was working under the constraints set up by large enterprises, which greatly limited his freedom. That year he left his job to start a company, Big Data Machine Learning, using his expertise in AI and data.

Ashutosh understood he did not want to just create any company, but an AI company that helped people while having a massive impact on society. After looking into education and healthcare as fields to assist, Ashutosh was led to HR, and started talking to many leaders in the industry. Through his listening, analyzing, and synthesizing, he got his first ah-ha moment in 2016 where he realized how important employment is for society. One aspect he discovered was, it is “who you know” that gets people employed, especially with big companies. Ashutosh is on a mission to change that using data and AI.

Company Name & Meaning

The name Eightfold AI came about through the philosophy of the Eightfold path to noble truth. It is all about learning and unlearning, to grow, develop, and to achieve the ultimate goal of your life. Ashutosh wants his company to be that Eightfold path for your career.

Finding Product-Market Fit

The technology Eightfold AI built is designed to use Artificial Intelligence to understand how people move through their careers. What the team has built uses many careers paths (more than a billion), all of the information you can understand about someone’s career path, and what makes them successful in their roles. The technology also helps determine what they will do next in their career, the jobs they’ve held, their education, their skills, etc. The algorithms will then take all of this information to understand what makes someone successful. By applying this at scale, Eightfold.AI can turn Artificial Intelligence into an Intelligent Talent Management Platform for the enterprise. The first of these applications that Eightfold AI went to market with was for talent acquisition and recruiting. A recruiting organization can then define its requirements and the AI will take all of the available talent and rank those individuals immediately based on who is the best fit for those roles.

This technology will also surface individuals who might not have jumped off the page if the recruiter quickly glanced at their resume. Eightfold AI has also taken this technology and applied this application for internal talent management. In the same way that the AI can recommend the individuals for a job, you can also recommend jobs available for an individual within the company.

Now Eightfold AI is looking into applying the experience for individuals looking for jobs. This is very impactful for a candidate looking at a career website, where the jobs come to find them rather than having to go and search for the job. Which, let’s be honest, can be frustrating and time consuming.

Another key value-add for using AI is that the technology is non-bias. All of the algorithms are designed to prevent any bias on visible or unknown personal characteristics. For example: age, gender, race, ethnicity, disability status, romantic orientation, etc. Not being considered by the algorithm creates better outcomes and more confidence since bias is avoided.

Getting Enterprise Clients

First, understand whether your solution is genuinely applicable to large enterprises or not. Secondly, ask yourself – are you ready for that? Selling to large enterprises takes a lot of upfront investment. Are you enterprise-ready or not? Eightfold also has security policies, in line with what enterprises will expect. Compliance is a liability of infrastructure. Something to consider.

Advice for Future Entrepreneurs

When you are first starting off, think of the problem that needs to be solved. Once you identify the problem, the first step is talking to key people and industry leaders to get their perception of the problem that needs solving. Second, make sure there is a market, because if there is not a market, nothing else matters. Think about the solution you have in mind, and the solution you will come up with to solve the problem. What is your unique selling proposition? Focus on your strengths in the market. The third component is to make sure your buyer can solve the problem quickly once you provide a product/solution.

Another piece of advice is to think of where the market is going to be in ten years. Make sure you can scale and have room to grow. If you do not pay attention to this aspect, you can easily become stagnant in your business. Make sure you have a strong support network because even on “good” days, anything can happen. You must have enough energy to push through and do not give up on your optimism. Stay grounded and focused. Find a balance between paranoia and optimism.