Eightfold CEO: Employers, embrace AI or get left behind

Eightfold CEO, Ashutosh Garg, kicked off the talent tech giant’s recent Cultivate 2023 event in London by declaring that artificial intelligence (AI) is already in our lives – and it has been since the 1950s.

The difference now is that the rate of innovation in AI is faster than ever, there’s been a drop in storage cost and an exponential increase in computing power. As a result, Garg predicted that there will be more growth in the next five years than in the last 25 years.

Organizations, therefore, need to get on board and embrace the ever-evolving AI, or they will get left behind, stated Garg.

Speaking during a panel session, Vicki Furnish, vice-president of global people solutions, operations and analytics at NTT Data, agreed and declared: “We have no choice…AI is here to stay…Change is inevitable.”

Employers now need to figure out how to navigate and mitigate fear of unknown that comes with new, emerging technology.

Furnish called on companies to focus on putting guardrails in place and ensuring they have “oversight” on how the AI is trained. This oversight is not one and one, it needs to continual to ensure that the AI is learning how  businesses want it to.

At Cultivate 2023, ETH Zurich’s director of AI policy Ayisha Piotti agreed on the need for guardrails and regulations around AI.

She declared in a fireside chat with Eightfold’s CPO Darren Burton that “AI is a force for good”, and there are huge benefits, but it must be done responsibly with privacy and trust top of mind.

It is important to remember that all jobs will affect by AI – as Garg noted in his keynote – but this doesn’t mean millions of roles will be eliminated.

NTT’s Furnish stated: “Your job today is not going to be the same as it is tomorrow”, but it’s not going away, it is just changing. This means organizations and employees need to work together to design the jobs of the future.

The nexus between AI, skills and diversity

On the topic of designing the jobs of the future, AI itself has a huge role to play in helping organizations transition into being future-ready, skills-based employers.

Garg declared that “we are living in a skills economy”. By leaning into skills, companies can become more resilient and focused on their future business needs, as well as support employees in building careers, rather than just having jobs.

AI can help HR teams and organizations identify (and fill) skills gaps. These technologies can also help employers better understand the skills they already have within the organizations. This helps companies to then match employees to the right internal mobility opportunities – whether that is new jobs, projects or gig opportunities.

All of this unlocks not just employees’ potential, but actually the whole organization’s.

It also stops employers seeing workers as “cogs in a machine”, and instead see them as essential contributors to the company’s future success – this was the view of Eightfold’s chief product officer Sachit Kamat in his Cultivate 2023 keynote.

While the utility of AI in skills mapping is top of mind for Vodafone’s global people and organizational development director Francesco Bianco, during a panel at Cultivate 2023, he also noted that AI’s role in improving diversity.

The other panel participants – Furnish from NTT, and Ubisoft’s global vice-president of talent Andrew Saidy – agreed.

Saidy shared: “AI is opening up opportunities for a lot of people that typically would not put their hand up” – this is because it suggests opportunities based on skills, thereby improving the diversity of candidates (internal and external) in the pipeline.

“The introduction of AI actually removes the ability to not be diverse because AI is agnostic”, stated Furnish.

But she did note that this is only the case if it is set up and structured correctly.

NTT has started getting a slate of candidates “totally based on skills” – no demographic information is available – and this is driving better hiring decision for the company, according to Furnish.

It’s time for better AI and skills tech

During a different panel at Cultivate 2023, Suzy Jearum, digital employee experience lead at Coca-Cola Europacific Partners, shared that Eightfold tools have been essential for matching employees with work, and providing visibility over how workers can grow and develop, including how they can access new opportunity.

Amgen’s executive director of global talent management Jan Tichy agreed in yet another panel session.

He noted that the biotech giant has been working on its skills taxonomy with Eightfold for a few years – and it is continuing to iterate in partnership with Eightfold.

Eightfold, of course, took the opportunity at Cultivate 2023 to talk about how it continuing to innovate and design new AI products to solve tech and skills challenges employers are facing.

While there were lots of announcements, the most prominent is Eightfold’s skills-based talent planning product.

This was announced by Garg in his opening keynote – it will integrate into the wider Eightfold talent platform, and support businesses in their future-planning, as well as agility and resilience.

As things stand, according to Garg, employers know the most about their employees on day zero – and that is just not good enough.

It is time to really leverage AI to generate talent insights that can predict the impact of emerging trends – a relevant example is ChatGPT – will have on skills in the present and the future, according to Eightfold’s Kamat.

The idea is to use AI to successfully retain, upskill, redeploy and offboard people, thereby helping HR leaders and managers to stay ahead of the curve and better weather any shocks.

Kamat concluded that many organizations are still using spreadsheets to do future planning – when they could be leveraging AI to make truly ‘data-driven decisions’.

AI is going nowhere, and the return on investment is clear. HR must get on board, or face being left in the dust.