00:05
Welcome to The New Talent Code, a podcast from Eightfold that provides practical, actionable advice for HR. We’ll interview today’s thought leaders and those already using best practices in HR to share their advice and get your workforce ready for anything. I’m your co-host, Ligia Zamora, and I’m Jason Cerrato. Each episode will feature change makers in the talent space to talk about how they’re using cutting edge technologies like AI to transform processes and rethink old constructs to solve today’s most pressing issues in HR, while also designing the workforce of the future. It’s what we call the New Talent Code.

00:47
Hello and welcome back to The New Talent Code. Today’s episode is a really special one. We’re going to take you inside Cultivate, our annual talent summit, where we heard from some of the brightest minds shaping the future of the HR industry. Yeah, across the keynotes, the panels and real world stories, one theme really stood out, “How agentic AI and talent intelligence are really helping organizations become agile, efficient, and, more importantly, people centered.” So Jason and I have pulled together a few of our favorite moments, from rethinking leadership models and building skills based organizations to unlocking the true value of AI in hiring and development. So let’s get into it.

01:38
Our (former) Co-CEO, Chano Fernandez, kicked off Cultivate ’25 with an introduction to agentic AI. It’s changing everything, and HR is in the driver’s seat to help redefine how work gets done with their organizations using it. But what is it? And how do we explain the value of autonomous agents working hand in hand with our people? Chano had a great analogy that helped us understand how agentic AI is a step up from generative AI.

02:03
What agentic AI is not, is not me being in the kitchen. That’s not- that my family can attest.

02:11
I am the typical line cookbook, right?

02:16
I follow the recipe. You tell me the ingredients, the exact measurements. Who cares if someone from the family doesn’t like cilantro or the tomatoes are not in good shape?

02:30
I’m like a machine. I follow. I do, I deliver. So what happens? Well, I would say, you know, the outcome is technically correct, and I feel proud about it, but it’s not inspiring.

02:45
So that’s not agentic AI, right now a chef, start imagining, start streaming, a big chef, mamma, Mia.

02:58
You know, that’s agentic AI, what does the chef do?

03:02
The chef, you know, tastes and improvises. The chef works with different ingredients.

03:12
The chef knows who they’re serving, and they need how to read the room, and they create some magic.

03:20
At the end of the day, the outcome is quite different, right? It’s not the same, and the difference is in the taste. And that is what I think is a good analogy to agentic AI.

03:31
Visualizing agentic AI as the chef in your kitchen cooking up a gourmet meal while you focus on other tasks, really hit home for me. I think Chano did a wonderful job making it clear that agentic AI isn’t just a trend or hype. You know, it’s a huge shift in this space, because it’s really going to allow businesses to change how they’re making decisions, how they’re analyzing data, and, more importantly, how they’re best using employee time, yeah, I completely agree. And you know, since Cultivate, I’ve had some great conversations about the ways agentic AI is showing up in HR. For me, the biggest takeaway from Chano’s keynote was how fast this technology is advancing, and how this is different from basic chat bots or copilots. And when you combine that with eight folds, ability to understand and continually gather organizational context, just how powerful this can be. It was also really impressive that Chano was also joined at both events by current eight fold customers, sharing stories of how they’re already producing results with Eightfold talent intelligence today, so to now think of what agentic capabilities may add. On top of that opens up just a lot of possibilities, definitely that agentic automation layer sitting on top of a system of intelligence. Love it. Really exciting. Yeah, really exciting. Our CEO and Co-Founder, Ashutosh Garg followed up by taking us through what’s next for Eightfold (agentic AI) at Cultivate, we introduced our autonomous AI interviewer, which is available 24/7 to meet candidates where they are and gives everyone in the interview process back the most valuable resource of all time. Take a listen: .

05:19
The challenge on the talent acquisition side, our entire process revolves around interviewing candidates. We screen because we cannot interview everyone.

05:30
Then as our challenge is hiring managers don’t have time candidates want to interview at home at night so that they don’t have to take time off from work, scheduling, managing that is painful, if we can actually automate that, if AI can start conducting those interviews.

05:53
Now, what is the beauty of that is we are able to bring that time back to the recruiters, back to the sourcers, back to the hiring managers, back to the employees who have to take time off from their busy lives to start interviewing the candidates and the other side. Now, candidates can go through the interview process at their own leisure.

06:14
So I think one of the most exciting things that Ashu announced in his keynote at Cultivate was the fully autonomous AI interviewer. I mean, I was blown away, just blown away at the capabilities and how human it sounded. I don’t know if that happened to you, Jason, but the fact that it can carry on dynamic conversations with candidates reasoning the entire time. And it’s not reading scripts, you know. And as Ashu said, this results in no more scheduling hassles, no more missed work hours, less clunky interview processes. It was just seamless, respectful, and again, just surprisingly human. There were moments I honestly got lost thinking it was actually a human on the other end. And I love that AI has progressed so much that it can actually assess them based on actual skills that candidates bring to the table, not just keywords on a resume. And the other part was the kicker in all of this, people actually like it. I don’t know if you caught this in the recordings that he played, but the candidates were actually thanking the interviewer. They were actually thanking the agents, which kind of made me chuckle, right? Ashu shared the clips of candidates asking questions and all the thoughtful interactions. So again, it’s not just about saving recruiters time. It really is reshaping what hiring can feel like. Yeah, I agree. It was also funny. If you remember, he had shared a personal story about getting caught in the past interviewing for another job because it was the only time he had taken time off. And you know, this gives people convenience to take interviews at their leisure when it makes sense for them. So you know, this is an exciting update that will help boost productivity and efficiency. In addition to adding that convenience, it’s also increasingly standardizing the process and offering the opportunity to gather more information for the interviewee. So if you think about it, it’s convenient, but it’s also working to increase fairness, in my opinion, from the perspective of the applicant, and improve matches and assessments. So there’s benefits to both the organization and the interviewee, while also being faster and more efficient. When you think about it, we’ve always said talent intelligence is a win, win, yeah, for both sides of the process, I think this continues to advance that conversation. Couldn’t agree more. R. Ray Wang, the principal analyst, founder and chairman of Constellation Research, recently joined us to share his buyer’s guide for agentic AI. I think the biggest takeaway from his session was to stop reading all the hype and start trying out AI, because that is where the learnings will happen and where we’ll figure out how humans and machines can work together.

09:06
Let’s say I have this AI powered physician that is 83% accurate going up against your personal physician. Who would see my AI based physician over the personal physician? So AI based physician, raise your hands. Anyone? Oh, I got a few. All right, your personal physician, raise your hands. I know it’s everyone else.

09:30
Let me, let me give you an important fact. Your personal physician is only 79% accurate. Now, who would see the AI based physician? Now, anybody? I got a few more takers. Human physician. All right, let me give you one more fact, my AI based physician is getting smarter with every interaction. And in fact, it’s learning from the collective corpus of knowledge and understanding what actually happens in treatment. And so even though your physician is catching up, they’re reading journals or certifying, you know, my wife is a physician, so don’t kill me yet.

10:00
But the point being is, I think AI based physicians may be smarter. So over five years, my AI based physician might be 95% accurate, and the human physician might only be 82% accurate. So who wants to see the AI based physician? All right, I got more takers. And so the answer is, how do we augment the human with the machine? And so the idea is then to take it to the next level, where your second opinion is actually coming from the machine or AI, but your first opinion is coming from your personal physician. And when you blend those two together, we augment the human with the machine, which actually is where we want to go to now. Then we trust human judgment and just human judgment, and that’s when you really just want to have the human in the loop.

10:45
You know, this interactive moment about the physician really caught my attention because it emphasized the role of human machines, collaboration and the blending of the work, how the answer, in most cases isn’t either or the best result is a combination of both, but in the right places. You know, this is where I think most organizations are today, trying to think through what work is truly human and what work is best to be assisted by AI. Oh, I totally agree. This was a great way to demonstrate to the audience how humans and machines can actually work together. I particularly love the example he gave early on about how real winners of AI and agentic capability are not just the providers of the technology, but the organizations that can build on it and expand productivity and revenue as a result of that at one point, he asked the audience which AC or refrigeration company they thought profited the most from the creation of that technology. And then he went on to show a financial chart, and the company that benefited the most from air conditioning and refrigeration wasn’t one of the AC manufacturers. It was actually Coca Cola. What a great moment. While we talked a lot about where we’re headed with agentic AI at cultivate, the talk of how becoming a skills based organization benefits your business remained a major theme. One of the best examples of this came from a session with Bayer and Arcadis on building an enterprise grade talent framework. Manuel Smukalla from Bayer talked about how his organization has completely changed their job architecture and how focusing on skills has been beneficial to them.

12:20
In order to understand our skills strategy, actually, you need to understand our business transformation of what we call dynamic shared ownership. So when I call when I am talking about dynamic shared ownership, I’m talking about a pretty significant system change that we have gone through, I would say, over the last two years. What does that actually mean? And you see a slide up here. It basically tells you, we’re putting the mission before the management. We’re putting the action before the alignment, and we’re putting micro teams before the hierarchy. In such a model, decision making is decentralized. In such a model, our teams are working in 90 day cycles where they are incorporating the feedback from the customers into their work. And the role of a leader is significantly different. What alone is a leader normally doing? A leader in our organization as part of this transformation, is there to coach people,

13:24
is there to empower them, and also to resolve conflicts. He or she is not there to solve day to day problems, which is a very different way of how we have been operating in the past.

13:38
We look at this as a system change, and a pretty fundamental system change that, as you can imagine, is very hard to operationalize and goes with a lot of change management. What this means, and what it actually means to our skill strategy, is that actually in such a model where you work in 90 day cycles, people get more exposed to projects, and in order to do that, you need to have skill transparency, which is where our skills journey comes in. Where it also plays in, is in our strategy of talent flow. Let talent flow to the mission critical teams. In order to do that, you need to have transparency on skills. And that’s exactly how our skills strategy is closely related to business transformation, which is called dynamic shared ownership.

14:29
I found this approach to the skills journey fascinating because, you know, we often think becoming skills based is the outcome, yeah, when, in reality, skills are the input to enabling a broader outcome. And I just love the way they didn’t start their stories with skills. They started their stories with the business imperatives and worked their way back to how they got there. And I also think it’s just very interesting. The Bayer initiative was an enterprise wide change led by the CEO and the Arcadis initiative to become skills powered.

15:00
I love that – skills powered – had their CIO as a project champion. I think that says a lot. I agree. And I would add that another key learning was that becoming a skills based organization isn’t just an HR initiative. It’s actually a business transformation. Because the truth is Bayer’s model and the way they laid it out, depends on having real time visibility into the skills in their organization, that way they can move the right talent to the right teams faster. Also, when decision making is decentralized and leadership shifts focus from managing tasks to actually empowering people, you need a very flexible, transparent skills infrastructure in order for all of this to work. So to me, this is a great reminder the skills aren’t just about workforce planning. They really are about unlocking agility across the entire enterprise. And finally, we had Deloitte join us to share a deeper dive into their 2025 Human Capital Trends report. On stage with them were two HR team members from Fortive, who shared how using talent intelligence has helped enable their organization’s business and human outcomes. One of the best insights they shared was how important ongoing calibration is to get the most out of AI.

16:12
I think first off, the word calibration is a mystery. You don’t know what that means, and so it really is refining what you’re looking for. Give me examples of profiles of what you’re looking for. So it’s really a refinement. Again, it’s not my word, but it’s such a big word that people get a little bit scared of as well. In regards to change management, once we start showing them this is really what you do, you show me three people that you think would be great for that role. Show me more and so. So I would say, like demystifying, that is part of the first step in regards to impact. We see that the more we calibrate, month over month, which is shout out to eight fold, because this is one of the vendors that brings us data and shows the value of the product. But month over month, we see that the more we calibrate, the faster time to fill is, so that is a real outcome to our managers and our recruiters to say, this will help you.

17:02
The more you calibrate, the more, the better quality, and the faster we can get to hire someone. And so that really is, to me, really the value of calibration and ensuring that that role fits your company’s needs. This is such a powerful reminder that AI isn’t a set it and forget solution. I mean, you just can’t do it. Really needs human input to get better over time. And what fortive is showing here is that ongoing calibration isn’t just a technical step, it’s actually a very strategic one. They continuously refine what good looks like through real world examples, and that way, they’re seeing faster time to fill and better hiring outcomes. To me, it’s just a great example of how human judgment and AI can work together to drive both speed and quality and talent decisions. I mean, Jason, you’ve run TA organizations in the past. What are your thoughts on this? I completely agree, and this was one of my favorite sessions, and we’re only sharing a tiny clip, so if people have a chance to go to our Cultivate page and see the entire session, I completely recommend that this conversation on calibration is very important. And what I liked about this was they discussed how month over month they can see the benefits proven out in their data. You know, over time, the matches get stronger, the process gets faster, and things become more efficient. Ford offered another quote during the session, which I loved. You know, they said talent intelligence provides the ability to get better and smarter with every use every day. It’s pretty good on day one, and that’s the worst that it’ll be. I just love that. That’s the worst that it will be. Well, that’s a wrap on this special Cultivate edition of The New Talent Code. If you missed the event, we hope these clips give you a taste of the energy, the insights and big ideas that define the day and where exactly HR is headed next. We’ll be back soon with more conversations about how talent leaders are navigating change and shaping the future of work. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you again soon!

19:09
Thanks for listening to The New Talent Code. This is a podcast produced by Eightfold and edited by Resonate Recordings. If you’d like to learn more, please visit us at eightfold.ai.

19:19
And find us on all your favorite social media sites, especially LinkedIn, where Jason and I share more advice on strengthening your HR strategies. We’d love to connect and continue the conversation with you.