How An AI Platform Is Matching Employees And Opportunities

Instead of relying on data-driven signals of past accomplishments, Eightfold.ai is using AI to discover the innate capabilities of people and matching them to new opportunities in their own companies.

Bottom Line: Eightfold.ai’s innovative approach of combining their own AI and virtual hackathons to create and launch new additions to their Project Marketplace rapidly is a model enterprises need to consider emulating.

Eightfold.ai was founded with the mission that there is a right career for everyone in the world. Since its founding in 2016, Eightfold.ai’s Talent Intelligence Platform continues to see rapid global growth, attracting customers across four continents and 25 countries, supporting 15 languages with users in 110 countries. Their Talent Intelligence Platform is built to assist enterprises with Talent Acquisition and Management holistically.

What’s noteworthy about Eightfold.ai’s approach is how they have successfully created a platform that aggregates all available data on people across an enterprise – from applicants to alumni – to create a comprehensive Talent Network. Instead of relying on data-driven signals of past accomplishments, Eightfold.ai is using AI to discover the innate capabilities of people and matching them to new opportunities in their own companies. Eightfold’s AI and machine learning algorithms are continuously learning from enterprise and individual performance to better predict role, performance and career options for employees based on capabilities.

How Eightfold Sets A Quick Pace Innovating Their Marketplace

Recently Eightfold.ai announced Project Marketplace, an AI-based solution for enterprises that align employees seeking new opportunities and companies’ need to reskill and upskill their employees with capabilities that line up well with new business imperatives. Eightfold wanted to provide employees with opportunities to gain new skills through experiential learning, network with their colleagues, join project teams and also attain the satisfaction of helping flatten the unemployment curve outside. Project Marketplace helps employers find hidden talent, improve retention strategies and gain new knowledge of who has specific capabilities and skills. The following is a screen from the Marketplace that provides employees the flexibility of browsing all projects their unique capabilities qualify them for:

Employees select a project of interest and are immediately shown how strong of a match they are with the open position. Eightfold provides insights into relevant skills that an employee already has, why they are a strong match and the rest of the project team members – often a carrot in itself. Keeping focused on expanding employee’s capabilities, Eightfold also provides guidance of which skills an employee will learn. The following is an example of what an open project positions looks like:

Employee applicants can also view all the projects they currently have open from the My Projects view shown below:

Project Marketplace is the win/win every employee has yearned for as they start to feel less challenged in their current position and start looking for a new one, often outside their companies. I recently spoke with Ashutosh Garg, CEO and Co-Founder and Kamal Ahluwalia, Eightfold’s President, to see how they successfully ran a virtual hackathon across three continents to keep the Marketplace platform fresh with new features and responsive to the market.

How to Run A Virtual Hackathon

Starting with the hackathon, Eightfold relied on its own Talent Intelligence Platform to define the teams across all three continents, based on their employees’ combined mix of capabilities. Ashutosh, Kamal and the senior management team defined three goals of the hackathon:

1. Solve problems customers are asking about with solutions that are not on the roadmap yet.
2. Accelerate time to value for customers with new approaches no one has thought of before.
3. Find new features and unique strengths that further strengthen the company’s mission of finding the right career for everyone in the world.

It’s fascinating to see how AI, cybersecurity and revenue management software companies continue to innovate at a fast pace delivering complex apps with everyone being remote. I asked Ashutosh how he and his management team approached the challenge of having a hackathon spanning three continents deliver results. Here’s what I learned from our discussion and these lessons are directly applicable to any virtual hackathon today:

1. Define the hackathon’s purpose clearly and link it to the company mission, explaining what’s at stake for customers, employees and the millions of people looking for work today – all served by the Talent Intelligence Platform broadening its base of features.
2. Realize that what you are building during the hackathon will help set some employees free from stagnating skills allowing them to be more employable with their new capabilities.
3. The hackathon is a chance to master new skills through experiential learning, further strengthening their capabilities as well. And often learning from some of the experts in the company by joining their teams.
4. Reward risk-taking and new innovative ideas that initially appear to be edge cases, but can potentially be game changers for customers.

I’ve been interviewing CEOs from startups to established enterprise software companies about how they kept innovation alive during the lockdown. CEOs have mentioned agile development, extensive use of Slack channels and daily virtual stand-ups. Ashutosh Garg is the only one to mention how putting intrinsic motivation into practice, along with these core techniques, binds hackathon teams together fast. Dan Pink’s classic TED Talk, The Puzzle of Motivation, explains intrinsic motivators briefly and it’s clear they have implications on a hackathon succeeding or not.

Measuring Results Of the Hackathon

Within a weekend, Project Marketplace revealed several new rock stars amongst the Eightfold hackathon teams. Instead of doing side projects for people who had time on their hands, this Hackathon was about making Eightfold’s everyday projects better and faster. Their best Engineers and Services team members took a step back, re-looked at the current approaches and competed with each other to find better and innovative ways. And they all voted for the most popular projects and solutions – ultimate reward in gaining the respect of your peers. As well as the most “prolific coder” for those who couldn’t resist working on multiple teams.

Conclusion

Remote work is creating daunting challenges for individuals at home as well as for companies. Business models need to change and innovation cannot take a back seat while most companies have employees working from home for the foreseeable future. Running a hackathon during a global lockdown and making it deliver valuable new insights and features that benefit customers now is achievable as Eightfold’s track record shows. Project marketplace may prove to be a useful ally for employees and companies looking to stay true to their mission and help each other grow – even in a pandemic. This will create better job security, a culture of continuous learning, loyalty and more jobs. AI will change how we look at our work – and this is a great example of inspiring innovation.

 

What’s New In Gartner’s Hype Cycle For Endpoint Security, 2020

• Remote working’s rapid growth is making endpoint security an urgent priority for all organizations today.
• Cloud-first deployment strategies dominate the innovations on this year’s Hype Cycle for Endpoint Security.
• Zero Trust Security (ZTNA) is gaining adoption in enterprises who realize identities are the new security perimeter of their business.
• By 2024, at least 40% of enterprises will have strategies for adopting Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) up from less than 1% at year-end 2018.

These and many other new insights are from Gartner Hype Cycle for Endpoint Security, 2020 published earlier this year and the recent announcement, Gartner Says Bring Your Own PC Security Will Transform Businesses within the Next Five Years. Gartner’s definition of Hype Cycles includes five phases of a technology’s lifecycle and is explained here.  There are 20 technologies on this year’s Hype Cycle for Endpoint Security. The proliferation of endpoint attacks, the rapid surge in remote working, ransomware, fileless and phishing attacks are together, creating new opportunities for vendors to fast-track innovation. Cloud has become the platform of choice for organizations adopting endpoint security today, as evidenced by the Hype Cycle’s many references to cloud-first deployment strategies.  The Gartner Hype Cycle for Endpoint Security, 2020, is shown below:

 

Details Of What’s New In Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Endpoint Security, 2020

• Five technologies are on the Hype Cycle for the first time reflecting remote working’s rapid growth and the growing severity and sophistication of endpoint attacks. Unified Endpoint Security, Extended Detection and Response, Business E-Mail Compromise Protection, BYOPC Security and Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) are the five technologies added this year. Many organizations are grappling with how to equip their remote workforces with systems, devices and smartphones, with many reverting to have employees use their own. Bring your PC (BYOPC) has become so dominant so fast that Gartner replaced BYOD on this year’s Hype Cycle with the new term. Gartner sees BYOPC as one of the most vulnerable threat surfaces every business has today. Employees’ devices accessing valuable data and applications continues to accelerate without safeguards in place across many organizations.
• Extended detection and response (XDR) are on the Hype Cycle for the first time, reflecting the trend of vendor consolidation across cybersecurity spending today. Gartner defines XDR as a vendor-specific, threat detection and incident response tool that unifies multiple security products into a security operations system. XDR and its potential to reduce the total cost and complexity of cybersecurity infrastructures is a dominant theme throughout this year’s Hype Cycle. XDR vendors are claiming that their integrated portfolios of detection and response applications deliver greater accuracy and prevention than stand-alone systems, driving down Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and increasing productivity. Key vendors in XDR include Cisco, FireEye, Fortinet, McAfee, Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks, Sophos, Symantec and Trend Micro.
• Business email compromise (BEC) protection is on the Hype Cycle for the first time this year. Phishing attacks cost businesses $1.8B in 2019, according to the FBI, underscoring the need for better security in the area of business email. Gartner defines business email compromise (BEC) protection as a series of solutions that detect and filter malicious emails that fraudulently impersonate business associates to misdirect funds or data. There have been many instances of business email compromise attacks focused on C-level executives, hoping that a fraudulent directive from them to subordinates leads to thousands of dollars being transferred to outside accounts or being sent in gift cards. Gartner found that fraudulent invoices accounted for 39% of such attacks in 2018, posing an internal risk to organizations and reputation risk.
• Unified Endpoint Security (UES) is being driven by IT organizations’ demand for having a single security console for all security events. Gartner notes that successful vendors in UES will be those that can demonstrate significant productivity gains from the integration of security and operations and those that can rapidly process large amounts of data to detect previously unknown threats. CIOs and CISOs are looking for a way to integrate UES and Unified Endpoint Management (UEM), so their teams can have a single, comprehensive real-time console of all devices that provides alerts of any security events. The goal is to adjust security policies across all devices. Absolute’s approach to leveraging their unique persistence, resilience and intelligence capabilities are worth watching. Their approach delivers unified endpoint security by relying on their Endpoint Resilience platform that includes a permanent digital tether to every endpoint in the enterprise. By having an undeletable digital thread to every device, Absolute is enabling self-healing, greater visibility and control. Based on conversations with their customers in Education and Healthcare, Absolute’s unique approach gives IT complete visibility into where every device is at all times and what each device configuration looks like in real-time.
• Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) is expanding rapidly beyond managing PCs and mobile devices to provide greater insights from endpoint analytics and deeper integration Identity and Access Management. Gartner notes interest in UEM remains strong and use-case-driven across their client base. UEM’s many benefits, including streamlining continuous OS updates across multiple mobile platforms, enabling device management regardless of the connection and having an architecture capable of supporting a wide range of devices and operating systems are why enterprises are looking to expand their adoption of UEM. Another major benefit enterprises mention is automating Internet-based patching, policy, configuration management. UEM leaders include MobileIron, whose platform reflects industry leadership with its advanced unified endpoint management (UEM) capabilities. MobileIron provides customers with additional security solutions integrated to their UEM platform, including passwordless multi-factor authentication (Zero Sign-On) and mobile threat defense (MTD). MTD is noteworthy for its success at MobileIron customers who need to validate devices at scale, establish user context, verify network connections, then detect and remediate threats.
•  Gartner says ten technologies were either removed or replaced in the Hype Cycle because they’ve evolved into features of broader technologies or have developed into tools that address more than security. The ten technologies include protected browsers, DLP for mobile devices, managed detection and response, user and entity behavior analytics, IoT security, content collaboration platforms, mobile identity, user authentication, trusted environments and BYOD being replaced by BYOPC.

 

Why Digital Transformation Always Needs To Start With Customers First

Customers’ expectations, preferences, changing patterns in how and why they purchase need to be the core of any digital transformation effort.

• 63% of organizations say delivering an excellent customer experience as measured by customer satisfaction scores defines success as a digital-first business, according to a recent IDG study.
• 67% of CEOs say acting with agility is “the new currency of business; if we’re too slow, we will be bankrupt,” according to KPMG.
• 33% of CEOs say their organizations are struggling to keep pace with the need to transform their businesses to stay competitive digitally based on KPMG’s research of manufacturers’ adoption of digital technologies.
• AI and machine learning are considered essential to digitally transforming organizations and making all processes more customer-centric, with 41% of CEOs saying these technologies will improve data governance and data analytics capabilities.

Customers’ expectations, preferences, changing patterns in how and why they purchase need to be the core of any digital transformation effort. With it, digital transformation projects flourish and take on a life of their own. Without it, I’ve seen digital transformation projects become myopic, narrowly focused, substituting internal metric gains for measures that matter most to customers.

Digital Maturity Drives Revenue

Anyone who has worked on a digital transformation project quickly sees how the most digitally mature organizations can turn their investments in transformation into revenue by overwhelming customers with value. Initiatives that put customers first can serve to generate greater confidence among C-level executives and board members, leading to more funding. This is because business cases for customer-centric digital transformation projects are easier to create, more defensible and best of all, point to revenue gains and cost reductions.

Deloitte Insights’ recent survey uncovering the connection between digital maturity and financial performance accurately reflects the true state of customer-centric digital transformation. The article explains how the more digitally mature an organization is, the more achievable gains are in diversity and inclusion, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), customer satisfaction, product quality, gross margin and long-term financial performance. Deloitte’s latest study finds a strong correlation between the digital maturity of an enterprise and its net revenue and net profit margin. The following graphic makes clear how valuable pursuing digital maturity is, with customers being at the center of all transformation efforts. This contributes to greater net revenue and net profit margin growth:

A fascinating point regarding Deloitte Insights’ research is the correlation it uncovered between an organization’s digital transformation maturity and the benefits they gain in efficiency, revenue growth, product/service quality, customer satisfaction and employee engagement. They found a hierarchy of pivots successful enterprises make to keep pursuing more agile, adaptive organizational structures combined with business model adaptability, all driven by customer-driven innovation. The most digitally mature organizations can adopt new frameworks that prioritize market responsiveness, customer-centricity and have analytics and data-driven culture with actionable insights embedded in their DNA.

Mastering Data & Removing Roadblocks Are Key To Driving Customer Value

The two highest-payoff areas for accelerating digital maturity and achieving its many benefits are mastering data and creating more intelligent workflows. Deloitte Insights’ research team looked at the seven most effective digital pivots enterprises can make to become more digitally mature. The pivots that paid off the best as measured by revenue, margin, customer satisfaction, product/service quality and employee engagement combined data mastery and improving intelligent workflows. The following graphic shows how 51% of revenue growth can be explained by these two factors alone and 49% of improved customer satisfaction.

Data mastery and intelligent workflows are among the easiest areas to measure and include in a business case for digital transformation projects aimed at delivering a transcendent customer experience. Choosing to excel on the dimension of customer-centric data mastery gives enterprises the insights they need to create their unique omnichannel platforms. Adding in intelligent workflows that give customers the freedom to buy how, where and when they choose across any digital platform is the cornerstone of entirely new digital business models today. Capturing the voice of the customer and combining data mastery and intelligent workflows to gain an accurate, true 360-degree view of customers is invaluable for every aspect of go-to-market strategies.

Achieving Digital Maturity Requires A Framework

Enterprises that have customer centricity and a data-driven mindset are the most likely to succeed with a digital transformation initiative. As the Deloitte Insights study inferred, the most digitally mature organizations are continually adapting to customer and market dynamics. They’re prioritizing market responsiveness, striving to improve customer-centricity and have data-driven cultures with actionable insights as part of their DNA. Enterprises who see new digital business model opportunities and act on them capitalize on these three areas of organizational strength. They’re also able to combine their data mastery and intelligent workflows to identify areas of competitive opportunity to help them excel for their customers.

Consider how cybersecurity is now part of any customer experience, for good and bad. Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) and many other forms of identity verification secure customer transactions, yet they can also cause dissatisfaction. For any digitally mature enterprise, integrating cybersecurity into their existing framework is a challenge. The growth of new frameworks designed to empower greater customer-centricity, agility and actionable insights across every facet of a business is a fascinating area of watch.

One of the more interesting is BMC’s Autonomous Digital Enterprise (ADE) framework, which is shown below. Mapping Deloitte Insights’ top investment priorities for the next 12 months across all digital maturity levels to the ADE framework shows why frameworks like BMC’s are gaining adoption, particularly as organizations look to run and reinvent themselves with new digital business models built around AI/ML capabilities. The following graphic provides insights into how Deloitte’s top investment priorities are integral to BMC’s Autonomous Digital Enterprise Framework and its many contributions to the success of new digital business growth.

Conclusion

Quantifying the impact of having a customer-centric digital transformation strategy has proved elusive until recently. Deloitte Insights’ research shows how digital maturity enables greater gains from customer-centric digital transformation efforts. What’s fascinating about their research is how the progression of digital pivots leads to improved margin, revenue, customer satisfaction, diversity and inclusion and product quality gains. Equally interesting is the growing utility of frameworks like BMC’s, which are designed to enable long-standing enterprises to seamlessly embrace new digital business models, so they can flex and change with the world around them.