India currently presents a fantastic opportunity to ride the AI wave: President Eightfold AI
BW People recently caught up with Kamal Ahluwalia, President of Eightfold AI to discuss how he and his team have deployed AI and machine learning to help address the talent gap. Edited excerpts from his interview.
Q- Tell us about your AI Platform and how it is different from the rest?
Eightfold.AI is a two-year-old AI company which is into the hiring and talent management space using Artificial Intelligence. In our view for a society to thrive it is very important to take care of three foundational aspects.
· Education
· Healthcare
· Employment
At Eightfold, we are focused on Employment. In India these challenges are massive right now. Many of the executives we are in touch with say that finding the correct talent that for their organization is really hard. A report on employment suggests that 28 per cent of the current positions at various organizations will be left unfulfilled. Clearly there is a massive skill gap. Resumes today are bad and JD’s (Job Descriptions) are even worse. So simply doing keyword or Boolean search between the two to find a match is not going to yield good results – and it shows.
We at Eightfold have a different approach at that. We create an enriched candidate profile and match what a candidate is capable of doing next with the relevant and updated job description. Right now our accuracy of predicting “what’s next” for a candidate is over 90 percent.
Q- How does Eightfold help companies in Talent retention?
We look at the issue of talent retention and attrition holistically. I’ll give you a couple of examples. We identify skill gaps for an employee and suggest ways to bridge them. Employees are empowered to determine what’s next for them inside their current organization. Our platform can proactively tell the employers that if an employee is likely to leave a company - It is then better to give him/her an opportunity to move into a new job role within the organisation. We also encourage companies to hire new employees on referral basis from the current employees. If an employee is referring a friend to their current employer. it shows that they think well of the company and that they have emotional attachment. These employees are unlikely to leave any time soon. All these use cases can be rolled out in a self-service mode to the employees – creating a much better engagement model.
Q- What do you perceive are the biggest challenges using AI in the HR space?
Today most of the organizations have different teams for different aspects of hiring and retention. They have separate teams for Talent Acquisition, Retention, Diversity, Employee benefits etc. So the biggest challenge we face is changing the mind-set. Companies need to have a far better alignment between corporate strategy and talent strategy – do you have the right people in place to execute your strategy. Once you get this realization – the rest is all doable with an AI platform like ours.
Q- How different is hiring and recruitment strategy in India than the US? Can you throw some light on your India strategy for 2020?
They are inter-linked. Today any good company in US or Europe has a good sized talent pool in India. You can’t solve the talent problems in the US without solving it in India as well.
In the next 3-4 years, India will have the largest millennial population in the world. We need to learn how to train and inspire the millennial workforce in US and in India.
In US the unemployment rate is 4 per cent today. Anybody who wants a job – has a job. Yet the talent gap has never been wider.
So if you take the massive young workforce in India and align them with the capabilities needed in US and Europe – you have a massive opportunity to ride the AI era. India is very strong in the math and science – and with better focus – can become a huge resource pool of well-trained data scientists. This can unlock the next wave of jobs coming to India for the next 20 years.
Q- What are your thoughts on the section 377 verdict? How do you think it is going to affect the community’s life at workplace?
It is a fantastic step for their inclusion in the society and workplace. It will remove biases and prejudices from individuals minds and companies and create a better work environment for the community. Now this is the real diversity and inclusion at workplace.
