Eightfold AI welcomes new CEO as the talent intelligence platform grows and scales

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Eightfold AI this month welcomed a new CEO, Joe Korngiebel, as the AI-native talent intelligence platform moves into its next evolution and expands its offering beyond AI-powered recruiting and toward a broader vision about how humans and AI can work together to accomplish business goals.

Korngiebel is taking the reins from Eightfold co-founder Ashutosh Garg, who led the talent intelligence company for a decade and is transitioning into a chairman role on its board of directors, according to the company. Co-founder Varun Kacholia remains the company’s CTO.

“Eightfold had gained a reputation as an AI leader in the space, and they’ve continued to keep a very AI-native stack,” Korngeibel told HR Brew in an interview during his first week at Eightfold. “They haven’t bolted on a lot of things. They’ve stayed pure, and they have an incredible customer base. So, I’m very interested in what’s next.”

Korngiebel spent more than 30 years in human capital technology, including a decade at PeopleSoft, before in 2006 joining Workday where he spent more than 14 years, with four as its CTO. Korngiebel arrives at the Santa Clara, Calif. AI powerhouse fresh from Dayforce, where, as its EVP and chief strategy, product, and technology officer, he helped grow the company from a payroll provider into a broader HCM platform.

“I think it’s the golden age for what we can do with people,” Korngiebel said. “Those are the companies that are going to fail if they treat AI transformation as solely the CIO’s responsibility,” he said.

Korngiebel sees the tech company’s primary opportunity in moving beyond traditional systems of record, which document what happened, into what he calls an “intelligent action layer” that helps companies understand their current workforce right now and plan for tomorrow.

“System of records record yesterday,” he said. “Where we’re really pushing is a system that tells me about today and where my people can go and where they can add more value; where AI can go, where it can add value to complement that, how people can harness that; and tell me about acting on today and forecasting for tomorrow, and that’s going to be a big push.”

What comes next? Eightfold already offers recruiting and talent management tools, including an AI interviewer, interview companion, and candidate concierge agent. Korngiebel said the future at Eightfold includes an AI recruiter agent to help teams handle repetitive tasks and spend more time with people, as well as tools that make reviewing job applications easier.

“We’re really really strong in the candidate relationship management recruiting space. So the full talent acquisition space from top to bottom, really really strong,” he said. “We’re diving into how we can provide an AI recruiter to complement your recruiting team so that they can do more work with people as opposed to again moving people from stage to stage, doing all the the block-and-tackling to make sure you do the compliance piece, make sure you’re ethical in everything you do.”

The company is also expanding TalentForge, its platform for letting customers create customized software experiences around their specific workflows. Korngiebel said the goal is to give customers their needed tooling for their specific flow of work without leaving them responsible for maintaining a patchwork of custom-built applications.

“It’s easy to build software today. What’s hard is to get outcomes from live customers using the AI,” he said.

He also argued that Eightfold’s AI-native architecture and decades of relevant customer work data are key advantages in the evolution of the wider AI transformation in business. The company draws on 1.6 billion career profiles and anonymized customer data on jobs and skills to improve its models and real-time recommendations, he said.

Korngiebel’s vision puts skills and work design at the center of the AI transformation. Transformation work requires CHROs to work more closely with CIOs and CFOs to determine which tasks people do best, what agents can handle, and how the two can complement each other, he said.

“We’re AI native. We have the flywheel. We have the data, and now we’re going to continue to grow, and we’re doing it with some of the biggest customers, achieving outcomes today,” he said.