Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Ashutosh Garg, CEO of Eightfold.ai (Part 1)

This is one of the best TLAI interviews I have done. Ashutosh has founded two AI-driven companies, so have I. We kick around heavy-duty material.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Eightfold.ai.

Ashutosh Garg: I got my PhD in AI from the University of Illinoi – Urbana Champagne. Then I did research in Google and then started a company called BloomReach in the e-commerce personalization space. You might remember doing this interview with my co-founder Raj over there.

Sramana Mitra: Yes, I remember very well. He came to see me at my house.

Ashutosh Garg: Around two years back, I started thinking about what I should do next. I wanted to do something that was helpful to society. I decided to look into education and healthcare.

Then I realized how important employment is for people and how it defines and changes their lives. In today’s time, you get a job based on who you know and not based on what you can do. I left BloomReach to start Eightfold. The mission was to enable the right career path for a billion plus people.

Today, we have around 100 plus employees serving customers in four different continents across 20 different countries. We are helping enterprises find the right people, find the hidden gems, find the people they might have missed.

Sramana Mitra: I think this is a perfect time to do some use cases. You have all these different customers. Maybe the use case is the same across customers, but you’re welcome to do one case where you illustrate the full power of your technology. You decide how you can best illustrate.

Ashutosh Garg: The go-to market are enterprises. They are the enablers of employment. Our typical customers are large enterprises with 2,000 or more employees. Because of the high attrition in the US, which is 25% across industries, companies are constantly filling in the positions.

At the same time, if you have a high-growth company, you try to have more people. Today, it’s very transactional in nature. You post a job description. interview, hire, and then bring them on board. We get a very good understanding of what kind of people an enterprise has hired in the past, who is performing, and who is leaving the organization.

We then use AI to model what works well in the organization. Additionally, we analyze the profiles of hundreds of millions of people. That gives us a good understanding of career paths of individuals. It also has given us some understanding of who has performed well. We power the career websites of enterprises.

What our customers are seeing is almost 50% to 80% in the number of qualified applicants. Instead of searching for a job, they can upload their resume and find the most relevant job for them. The second part is, as a recruiter, they log into Eightfold and find the candidates that are most relevant for the position.

If you are a 10,000-person company, you have engaged with more than a million people. We go look at each of those people understanding what they are doing now. We further analyze their profile to understand their potential. What are the areas that you should focus on when interviewing? Who in your company might know this person?

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Ashutosh Garg, CEO of Eightfold.ai
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