- We live in an era of abundance when time is one of our most limited resources. In HR, agentic AI is unlocking ways to give people more time.
- Autonomous AI interviewers, like EightfoldAI Recruiter, are available 24/7 to meet candidates where they are through engaging, dynamic interactions, while improving selection outcomes for talent teams.
- Though it sounds futuristic, digital twins will become more commonplace. These twins will be able to transfer knowledge, mentor team members, and amplify productivity in new and exciting ways.
The changes that the world has seen in the last 200 years are staggering. Back then, the global population was 1 billion; people were dying from malaria, polio and famine; and electricity hadn’t been invented.
Fast forward to today, and the world’s population has grown eightfold (see what we did there?). We are living in a time of abundance, with all the food, medicine and electricity we need, and then some.
But now, there’s a different commodity that’s scarce: time.
In his keynote at Cultivate, Co-CEO and Co-founder Ashutosh Garg said the age of agentic AI is also ushering in the age of saving valuable time.
“What are these agents about? Are they about productivity? Are they about efficiency? Are they about cost?” he asked. “Or are they truly about giving us time back?”
As we edge further into the exponential age, where the rate of development in the world is faster than we’ve ever imagined, Garg said we must rethink what the future will look like. Then we must embrace solutions that will make us smarter, more effective, and more available, by giving us more time back.
How will agentic AI allow us to capture that time? Here are a few highlights from his keynote.
Making the most of the interview process with AI interviewers
The talent acquisition process is labor intensive and revolves around time-consuming interviews, which impact job candidates, recruiters, and hiring managers. This has been a resource drain for decades.
Garg shared a memory from 2004, when his boss at IBM Research suspected he’d been interviewing for another position after he missed six hours of work. (He was right, Garg had just accepted a job at Google.)
Now, the EightfoldAI Recruiter is shifting the paradigm.
The AI interviewer autonomously engages in dynamic conversations with candidates and is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week to conduct interviews at the candidate’s convenience. That means candidates can schedule interviews during the weekends or at night and don’t have to take time off work or arouse suspicion from their managers.
At Eightfold, every candidate now goes through an AI interview, and the process has been eye-opening. Garg shared clips that showcased a natural back-and-forth between the agent and applicant, with each asking questions of the other.
One person interviewed complimented the AI interviewer for asking a good question. Another admitted she’d felt hesitant to do an interview with an AI agent but, in the end, thanked that agent for the opportunity.
“The social acceptance of that is just phenomenal,” said Garg.
Using this technology doesn’t just save time. It underscores the fact that Eightfold is an AI-first company that deploys the software it builds. Even before they’re hired, candidates experience the way that AI is transforming talent acquisition, and they become believers.
Related content: Learn more from Garg about his views on how agentic AI will enhance HR’s work in the future.
Assessing the right candidates with timely, intelligent insights
Like a parent knows their children, agentic AI solutions enable a deeper understanding of an organization’s workforce and potential hires.
A few years ago, Garg recalled, his older son awoke with a stomach ache. Rest and medicine didn’t seem to help, and by nighttime the child told his father he couldn’t bear the pain. Garg rushed him to the hospital, where he was treated urgently for appendicitis.
As his father, Garg says he knew to believe the boy. However, he admits that if it had been his younger son complaining of a stomach ache, he would have assumed that it was all a ploy to play video games and handled it differently.
The Eightfold Talent Intelligence Platform analyzes an organization’s workforce in much the same manner.
“It’s not about the keywords on the résumé,” Garg said. “It’s not about the text on the job description. It’s truly understanding what makes someone successful in your organization, what skills are needed, how roles are evolving in our organization, what tasks those people are doing.”
Assessing someone’s skills and abilities during an interview can be challenging and time-consuming for a hiring manager. However, through dynamic conversational interactions, an AI interviewer is equipped with the right data to rapidly determine whether a candidate has the agility and skills needed to grow with the organization, just as a parent understands their child.
Transferring knowledge and improving efficiency with digital twins
Throughout history, humans have handled tasks for other humans — whether as assistants or chiefs of staff — freeing up time on the job. Today, people can delegate duties and ask for help from agentic AI, in the form of their own digital twin.
After all, in this digital era much of our work, our communications, and our thoughts are shared over email, work management tools, video calls, documents, and virtual meetings — all of which can inform an individual’s personalized large language model (LLM) that captures their wisdom, knowledge, skills, and experiences, as well as their decisions, networks, and expertise.
That digital twin can then lighten an employee’s load.
Take training a new hire as an example. On average, it takes three months for someone to ramp up at a new job. But if a new hire has access to the digital twin of their predecessor, they could ask unlimited questions and glean insights and knowledge like never before, reducing onboarding from months to weeks and dramatically improving the efficiency of the organization.
Garg played a compelling clip of his own Eightfold Digital Twin participating in a candidate interview, and the voice was indecipherable from the original. In addition, digital twins could act as mentors to their colleagues, and they could assist in impartial assessments during performance reviews.
While the concept sounds futuristic and a little bit spooky, digital twins are rapidly becoming a reality, said Garg.
“Over the next three to five years, each and every one of us will have our own digital twin or digital replica — a digital clone that knows everything that we have done, has our full knowledge, understanding of all our experiences, our wisdom,” he said. “That is the world that is unfolding right in front of our eyes.”
Redefining our roles in the age of AI
As agentic AI advances, it’s germane to ponder the difference between humans and machines and determine where one could complement the other.
While AI may never match human reason, ingenuity, or grit, it has already surpassed us in memory, and its capabilities are vast and here to stay.
“AI is not about productivity, it’s not about efficiency, it’s not about any of those things,” said Garg. “We are really entering the age of time, and I’m super excited to help you enter the age of time with Eightfold.”
Missed Cultivate ’25 in the U.S.? Catch our leaders’ keynotes in London on June 10.