Eightfold Co-CEO: HR, you have to be bold with AI to reap the rewards

25 years ago, AI was not cool; how things have changed.

Now, “no matter which part of the world you are in, whether you’re sitting in the boardroom, a research lab, or at dinner with family and friends everyone is talking abut AI”.

That’s how Eightfold’s Co-CEO and Co-Founder, and AI pioneer, Ashutosh Garg, opened the HR tech company’s Cultivate Europe 2024 event in London. The event returned for a second year, and UNLEASH was in the room.

Speaking to an audience of HR leaders, he joked “how many of you joined HR because you were excited to manage all the systems, and worry about compliance?”

“We do the job because we want to do something for society, we wanted to help people with their career”, but, Garg stated, the reality is that HR leaders are being hindered by a lot of tech pain.

They are grappling with 30, 50, 100 different systems, and that’s creating so much pain and inefficiency, rather than value.

Rather than spending 90% of their time on the interface, admin and process management, HR leaders (and employees and organizations more broadly), need simple, easy to use tools in the flow of work.

Eightfold wants to offer this to its customers through Eightfold Copilot – it’ll provide experience that means everyone can focus on the work they’re excited about – it will do that “no matter what underlying system you are using, whatever tool you’re using”, shared Garg.

Later into the Eightfold Cultivate Europe 2024 opening keynote, Deloitte’s Partner Christoph Gerhold took to the stage. He talked about the professional services’ giants recent Human Capital Trends Report – you can read UNLEASH’s top takeaways here.

Gerhold stated that employers “owe it” to workers to use AI to make their work better – there’s no more excuses to not take action, and learn from the consumer world.

The technology is ready – “it is not the technologies, but our mindset, that hinders us from really moving forward”, shared Gerhold.

There’s no space to hide; HR leaders need to use AI to make work better for humans.

Garg concluded: “Sometimes you have to take bold steps, bold moves, to show what is possible” – could this new era of AI, if done right, be HR’s landing on the moon moment?

Being responsible by design with AI

Taking to the stage after Garg was his fellow Co-CEO Chano Fernandez. Just six months ago, Fernandez joined Eightfold from Workday, where he served as co-CEO until January 2023.

He said in his conversations with customers about why he joined Eightfold, the answer was the HR tech company’s purpose and “potential”- “we are just getting started”.

Chano Fernandez, Co-CEO, Eightfold on stage at Eightfold Cultivate Europe.

He added that the HR tech company has been in AI from the beginning, and it really prioritizes responsible AI by design.

Sticking with that thread of AI regulation and compliance, Madeline Laurano, HR analyst and Aptitude Research Founder, interviewed Lord Chris Holmes in a fireside chat.

Lord Holmes of Richmond is a paralympic swimmer and is a passionate advocate for the potential of technology, particularly AI and blockchain, to create a more diverse, inclusive and accessible society.

He told the audience at Eightfold Cultivate Europe that we need to think of technologies as tools that are in our hands – “we decide, we determine, we choose” how to use them.

But Lord Holmes is clear that “wait and see” is not the right approach to AI generally, but especially when it comes to AI regulation (it’s the route he criticized the current UK Government of taking). In fact, he argues it will stifle innovation.

Instead, companies need clear regulation, which is human-led and does not accept any biases at all in AI technology.

He suggested that organizations have an AI Responsible Officer – something which UNLEASH has reported on previously – and that everyone is more outward (than inward) looking when thinking about AI regulations and compliance.

It is not about doing AI alone; it is about finding the right partners – including HR tech vendors – who you can learn from and work with.

Lord Chris Holmes and Madeline Laurano on stage at Eightfold Cultivate Europe in London.

Laurano summed up the conversation with two words: collaboration and clarity.

“It says a lot that this room is standing room only for a discussion on AI regulations – I don’t think we would have seen that five years ago. It shows how far we’ve come as an industry,” she concluded.