Most people would love a personal assistant. Imagine leaving a pile of dishes on the counter next to the sink after dinner, directing an assistant to take care of the rinsing, scrubbing and drying, and focusing on putting your kids to bed. Brush those teeth! Are you sure you brushed them?
Well it’s not possible. For now, you’ll have to continue to handle the dishes and bedtime routine. Sorry.
At the office, on the other hand, Eightfold AI is betting on “digital twins,” generative AI-powered tools that can document employees’ work as they’re doing it and provide customized replies to queries related to it.
“In near future, over 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 all our experiences,” said Eightfold AI’s cofounder and co-CEO Ashutosh Garg at Eightfold AI’s customer event and conference, Cultivate, in Southern California this week. “That is the world that is unfolding right in front of our eyes.”
Eightfold AI’s Digital Twin integrates with a company’s enterprise work systems to capture the context of an employee’s work including the decisions they've made, the relationships they've built, and the expertise they've developed in their specific role. The digital twin is trained on the deep wells of employee data your company already collects from enterprise tools like emails, messages on platforms, project management tools, and work product/documents.
The tool copies the data and uses it to deliver a digital version of the employee informed by the employee’s own work and digital footprint.
“Most of us, 90% of the work is over emails, Slack, Teams, Zoom meetings, team meetings, documents, document editing. What Eightfold is doing is now taking all the data to build a personalized language model for each individual. It’s not a generic ChatGPT. It is your own model that knows everything that we have there,” Garg said.
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Eightfold executives pointed to onboarding and training as key use cases for the twin.
“The reality is, it takes roughly three months, on average, across the organization, for anyone to ramp up,” Garg said, adding that if equipped with access to a digital twin of a new hire’s predecessor, knowledge can be shared and transferred almost seamlessly and a new hire can query a large language model trained on the previous work.
Eightfold imagines additional uses to include assistance delivering performance management assessments informed by the documented work rather than an employee’s memory. Garg even showcased an AI interviewer at the conference powered by his digital twin.
But employees can also use the tech as an assistant or as a repository for information the human brain could not contain.
Garg told reporters and industry analysts at the event that the tool could be called on to prepare notes ahead of an employee’s meetings for the day, profile who the meetings are with, and write-up a history to remind them what happened during the last meeting, and offer important context or takeaways related to the day’s agenda.
Eightfold execs say it will be up to customers to organize and manage the privacy, permissions to access or query an employee’s twin, and decisions about IP ownership, but noted that the data training the digital twin is already collected by organizations via other platforms.
“Every company is going to have its own perspective on its employment agreements, and we will provide a product that's configurable enough to adjust to that reality,” said Sachit Kamat, Eightfold’s chief product officer.