Ten years ago, Eightfold was founded with an idea that was simple to say and extraordinarily ambitious to pursue: the right career for everyone in the world.
The idea came from a contradiction I kept seeing. Hiring managers would tell me they could not find good people, while talented friends would tell me they could not find good jobs. There was clearly talent in the world, and there was clearly opportunity, but the system connecting the two was not working.
That mattered because employment is about much more than having a job. A career shapes whether someone can support a family, find purpose, build confidence, and create the life they want. Yet the way we made decisions about talent understood surprisingly little about what people were actually capable of becoming. Traditional hiring was designed largely to filter volume, not identify potential. A résumé could tell us where someone had been, but not necessarily what they could learn, the adjacent skills they possessed, or where they could succeed next.
My career before Eightfold had been spent working on personalization, search, ranking, and recommendations, including at Google and later when I co-founded BloomReach. Eightfold co-founder Varun Kacholia brought deep experience building large-scale recommendation systems at Facebook and YouTube. We had seen technology become remarkably good at understanding relevance and using enormous amounts of information to identify what might be valuable to someone next. We believed those same advances in AI could be applied to something far more consequential: a person’s career.
That meant looking beyond job titles and résumés to understand skills, learnability, career trajectories, and potential. The deeper shift was moving from a system focused on what someone had already done to one capable of understanding what they could do next. It also meant recognizing that recruiting, internal mobility, learning, and workforce planning were not fundamentally separate problems. They all depended on a deeper understanding of what a person can do today and what they could become tomorrow.
That became the foundation of Eightfold. We did not start with an existing HR workflow and ask where we could add AI. We started with intelligence and focused on what it could make possible.
A decade of innovation
Innovation at Eightfold has always been about using advances in AI to expand what is possible for people and organizations. What began as an idea about understanding human potential has grown into something much bigger. From its beginnings in a small space in Sunnyvale, Eightfold has grown into a global company, with Fortune 500 companies now making up one-third of its customer base and new customers for its agentic products quadrupling this year alone.
Talent intelligence now operates at enterprise scale, connecting recruiting, internal mobility, skills, and workforce planning around a deeper understanding of people and potential.
The scale matters because it shows how far the original idea has traveled.What started as a belief that AI could help organizations see talent differently is now being applied across 155 countries and supporting up to 30 languages. For me, that is the most meaningful measure of growth: not simply how large Eightfold has become, but how many more people and organizations the technology can help.
One of the most important lessons I learned along the way is that technology only matters when it creates real value for someone. In the early days, customers took a bet on our vision, and our job was simple: make them successful. That meant listening closely, learning where our assumptions were wrong, and improving relentlessly. The mission gave us direction, but customer outcomes gave us the discipline to turn that ambition into a real company.
From the beginning, we also knew that applying AI to something as consequential as employment came with enormous responsibility. Responsible AI was never something to add once the technology reached scale. It has been part of the architecture from the start, with transparency, governance, and human accountability built into how AI is designed and used. For us, trust and innovation have always had to move together.
Today, we are at another important inflection point. AI is moving beyond understanding and recommending, to taking action.
Agentic AI can participate directly in work, carrying out tasks and helping people accomplish more rather than simply providing them with information. For Eightfold, that opens a new frontier in how intelligence can transform the way work gets done.
The same principle that shaped Eightfold from the beginning, using intelligence to see possibilities that traditional systems miss, now extends beyond talent decisions into how organizations design and build the systems through which work gets done.
TalentForge is part of that next evolution. For most of the history of enterprise software, organizations have bought predefined applications, configured them around their needs, and adapted their processes to what the software could support. AI is beginning to reverse that relationship. We are entering an era where organizations can build software around their own people, data, workflows, and ways of working.
I believe that the shift from primarily buying software to building the software an organization needs will reshape enterprise technology. AI changes who can create software, how quickly it can be created, and how continuously it can evolve. We started by using AI to rethink how organizations understand talent. Now Eightfold is helping rethink the software through which work gets done.
This next phase of Eightfold will require a builder’s mindset, and that is one of the reasons I am so excited for Joe Korngiebel to lead the company forward. Joe has spent three decades building enterprise HR technology. He pairs real product vision with a deep respect for customers, and he understands what it takes to turn major shifts in technology into products that work for the world’s most complex organizations. As Eightfold enters its next build phase, I believe that combination of product vision, enterprise experience, and customer focus makes Joe exactly the right leader for what comes next.
Joe also steps into a leadership team that has been evolving for this next chapter. Amber Grewal, Chief Customer & Growth Officer, brings deep experience in talent transformation and growth, while Jason Gorski,Chief Sales Officer, brings more than two decades of experience building and scaling enterprise sales organizations. What excites me about this team is the combination of builders and operators who understand both where the technology is going and what it takes to create real value for customers. Together, they give Eightfold the leadership to keep innovating, deepen our customer partnerships, and turn the possibilities ahead into the next phase of growth.
That is why I believe some of Eightfold’s most important innovations are still ahead. We have the technology, the leadership, and most importantly, the team to keep pushing the boundaries of what is possible. Our customers continue to bring us harder problems, and that continues to push us to build, learn, and raise the bar. I could not be prouder of what we have built together, or more confident in what Eightfold will build next.
What comes next
The next decade will be even more consequential than the last. AI is moving from helping us understand the world to helping us act in it. It can already take on work, create software, coordinate tasks, and give people capabilities that once required much larger teams or highly specialized expertise. I believe we are entering a period when many of the constraints that have shaped how companies organize work for decades will begin to loosen.
That creates an extraordinary opportunity. The future of work should not simply be today’s jobs with more automation layered on top. We can redesign work itself. AI can take on more of the repetitive execution that consumes people’s time, while people focus more of their energy on judgment, creativity, relationships, and solving problems that matter. Small teams will be able to accomplish what once required much larger organizations, and individuals will have access to capabilities that were previously out of reach.
For leaders, this will require a different mindset. Workforce planning has traditionally started with jobs and headcount. AI changes that equation. The starting point can become the outcomes an organization wants to achieve, and how people and AI can work together to achieve them. The organizations that embrace that shift will not simply become more efficient. They will be able to imagine entirely new ways of working.
Ten years of building Eightfold has taught me that technology alone does not create that future. AI can reveal possibilities, but people and organizations still have to act on them. They have to rethink processes, develop new skills, make different decisions, and remain accountable for how the technology is used. The future I am optimistic about is not machine-led. It is human-led and machine-scaled.
It is with that future in front of us that I am excited to hand the baton to Joe Korngiebel. Joe brings decades of experience in enterprise HR technology, deep product judgment, and a strong respect for customers. I believe he is exactly the leader Eightfold needs for its next chapter, and I will continue to support the company from the board, now as chairman.
When Varun and I started Eightfold, we had an ambitious idea: the right career for everyone in the world. Ten years later, the possibilities are far greater than we could have imagined when we began. Eightfold is still innovating, still building, and still pushing toward what comes next.
