- AI Interviewer and Digital Twin personalize hiring and preserve knowledge, and will help organizations scale smarter, faster and more effectively across the entire talent journey.
- Responsible AI is built into our foundation, ensuring fairness, compliance, and trust at every stage of the talent life cycle.
- AI and people will collaborate to unlock creativity, enhance productivity, and build more fulfilling careers.
I remember the moment we first envisioned Eightfold.
After years of building core systems at Google — search, recommendations, machine learning — I began asking myself a new question: How can we apply AI to solve a meaningful challenge for humanity?
It turns out the answer, only making systems smarter. It’s in helping people realize their full potential.
Employment — what we do, how we grow, and the opportunities we have — affects everything. It shapes livelihoods, communities, and generations.
That’s why we started Eightfold: to use AI not just to improve processes, but to unlock careers, encourage equity, and create more fulfilling work for people everywhere.
Now, 8 years later, we’re entering a new phase. At Cultivate ’25, I had the privilege of sharing what’s next: two new innovations built on our Talent Intelligence Platform and why I believe the future of work must be built by AI and people together.
Our AI Interviewer and Digital Twin are the next exciting offering from Eightfold, built into our Talent Intelligence Platform.
Building the foundation: the Talent Intelligence Platform
When we first introduced the idea of a Talent Intelligence Platform, it was met with skepticism. Many thought slightly improving their existing enterprise systems would be enough.
But we believed differently. We saw a future where AI could power a unified, intelligent system that helps organizations hire, retain, and grow talent more effectively than ever before.
Today, that platform has matured into a full-stack AI system that connects candidates, recruiters, hiring managers, employees, and leaders. From sourcing to succession planning, it’s built with intelligence at the core — not as an add-on.
Three things make this platform stand out:
- A unified data layer that understands billions of career paths, roles, skills, and industries across geographies and languages.
- Deep integration with enterprise systems, including ATS, HRIS, LMS, performance tools, and more.
- Purpose-built AI models that power personalized, contextual experiences for every user.
This platform is the engine that powers our latest innovations: AI Interviewer and Digital Twin.
Introducing AI Interviewer: personalized interviews at scale
When people hear “AI interviewer,” they often imagine a voice assistant powered by a generic chatbot. What we’ve built is far more sophisticated.
AI Interviewer understands your organization — roles, talent architecture, high performers, and priorities. It delivers highly personalized, scalable, and effective interviews.
This isn’t a script or a wrapper on a general-purpose LLM. It’s an intelligent experience built on years of deep understanding.
And it’s already transforming how we hire at Eightfold. Every candidate now goes through an AI interview, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive from hiring teams and candidates.
AI Interviewer allows organizations to move faster, assess talent more consistently, and improve the candidate experience without sacrificing depth or nuance.
Take a peek at what is possible with Digital Twin, an agentic AI offering designed to help you work smarter and more effectively.
Digital Twin preserves expertise, elevates productivity
If our AI Interviewer is designed for hiring, Digital Twin is designed for working. It addresses one of the biggest challenges facing organizations today: the loss of knowledge.
As people switch teams or leave, critical expertise often disappears. With Digital Twin, we can capture that knowledge and make it accessible across the organization.
By integrating with tools like Outlook, Slack, Teams, JIRA, CRMs, and more, Digital Twin becomes a real-time intelligence layer that surfaces insights, provides context, and supports productivity.
This isn’t a theoretical use case. We’ve already deployed Digital Twin within Eightfold.
When experts transition roles, their knowledge is no longer lost. Instead, it compounds, empowering onboarding, learning, mentorship, and performance management in real time.
It starts small: a digital twin of yourself, accessible only to you. Then you expand to onboarding, to functional teams, and to the full organization.
The result: a smarter, more connected enterprise where institutional knowledge lives on and grows stronger.
Responsible AI isn’t optional — it’s essential
From day one, we built Eightfold with a responsible AI framework. Fairness, transparency, auditability, and explainability are built into our foundation.
Our AI has been independently audited and certified for fairness and equity. We’ve worked closely with customers, works councils, and regulators to ensure we meet and exceed standards like SOC 2, SOC 3, GDPR, and the emerging EU AI Act.
This isn’t just compliance — it’s leadership.
To highlight why this matters, we conducted open research comparing general-purpose LLMs to our domain-specific hiring models.
The results were clear: our models outperformed in accuracy and fairness by a significant margin. In some cases, general-purpose models were non-compliant with current regulations.
That’s because general-purpose AI is trained for breadth, not depth. In contrast, our models are trained with the right data, the right evaluation frameworks, and purpose-built for the talent domain.
The next era of work is AI and people — together
There’s a lot of anxiety right now about AI replacing people, but I believe something very different: AI will amplify human creativity, intelligence, and possibility.
If you look back a generation or two, most of us would agree our careers are more fulfilling than those of our grandparents. My hope is that our children will say the same about us — that they’re more creative, more empowered, and more connected because of the tools we built.
That’s why we do this. Not to automate people out of jobs, but to engineer a future where everyone can realize their full potential.
AI alone won’t build that future. People won’t either. But together, AI and people can make it possible, and that’s a future worth building.
Watch this session from Cultivate ’25, Engineering the future of talent, available now on demand.
Varun Kacholia is CTO and Co-founder of Eightfold AI.