From Hiring to Growth and the Future of Workforce Strategy - with Meghna Punhani of Eightfold AI

Welcome everyone to the AI in business podcast. I'm Matthew D'Amelo, editorial director here at Emerge AI Research. Today's guest is Magna Poonani, chief people officer at Eightfold AI, a leader in talent strategy and workforce transformation driving people first approach and AI powered innovation. Eightfold AI provides a complete AI platform for talent management to help companies find, recruit, and retain workers with the goal of increasing efficiency and effectiveness of talent operations. Magna joins us on today's show to explore how HR leaders can harness AI responsibly and strategically, balancing technological adoption with human judgment.

Throughout our conversation, we dive into how AI is reshaping roles in talent acquisition, internal mobility, and employee development, and what it takes to build a workforce that thrives in a rapidly evolving skills landscape. Today's episode is sponsored by Eightfold. But first, are you driving AI transformation at your organization, or maybe you're guiding critical decisions on AI investments, strategy, or deployment? If so, the AI in business podcast wants to hear from you. Each year, Emerge AI Research features hundreds of executive thought leaders, everyone from the CIO of Goldman Sachs to the head of AI at Raytheon and AI pioneers like Joshua Bengio.

With nearly a million annual listeners, AI in business is the go destination for enterprise leaders navigating real world AI adoption. You don't need to be an engineer or a technical expert to be on the show. If you're involved in AI implementation decision making or strategy within your company, this is your opportunity to share your insights with a global audience of your peers. If you believe you can help other leaders move the needle on AI ROI, visit emerge.com and fill out our thought leader submission form. That's emerge.com and click on be an expert.

You can also click the link in the description of today's show on your preferred podcast platform. That's emerge.com/expertone. Again, that's emerj.com/expertone. Without further ado, here's our conversation with Magna. Magna, welcome to the program.

It's a great pleasure having you.

Thank you for having me, Matthew. It's a pleasure to be here.

Absolutely. I I think for a lot of the conversations we've been having on the show this year, especially taking a a much deeper look at HR. I think these are really enlightening conversations, especially because they illuminate so much of the nuance around I I think especially for the mainstream media and and folks at home, what they've been hearing so much about, oh, AI is is going to do this to jobs or do that to jobs. It's far from any zero sum game that I hear it, you know, presented as, over and over again in the media. But, that doesn't take away from the fact that enterprises face a dual challenge, competing for external talent in a rapidly shifting market while also unlocking the untapped potential within their own workforce.

Skills are becoming outdated faster than ever, and the pressure to adapt, of course, is relentless to say the least. Agentic AI is offering a new way to optimize hiring and a means of dynamically shaping workforce capabilities for the future. Today's conversation explores how HR leaders can harness these tools responsibly and strategically. That being said, I think, you know, across industries, and I hear this so often, especially in the financial services space of, you know, hey. Great that we have this agentic, but we're not even using the deterministic stuff everywhere we could be for for all of these efficiencies.

So maybe taking a couple steps back, from AgenTik for a moment, let's at least get a pulse on really the state of play in the HR space, for AI. What are you seeing as the big headwinds for HR leaders trying to drive AI adoption in their workspaces for the ends of bringing out the best in people and their skills?

So, you know, if I take a step back and just only think about my own team right now, I look at you know, I I with all the tools that are out there, like, I look at what is the role of a HR business partner going forward? What is really a role of a a talent acquisition person going forward? Let's take HR VP. If anyone around the world who has a decent understanding of prompt engineering and is really able to go to any of the tools, their favorite ones, flaw in Gemini, chat GPT, any of these LLMs, and is simply able to write a prompt and ask a question that, hey. Here's my situation.

This is what I'm running into. This is a background. How do I solve this problem? Think about coaching for that matter. Any of these tools are able to put a framework for you out there and not just that, the real dialogue, the way in which you would view, you should be engaging with an employee or with a a peer or a colleague or anyone for that matter.

So when I look at of course, HR VPs do a lot more than that. But if I look at some of these, tools that are out there, if you if you really look at it, you know, solutions for people who are seeking them can actually seek them really easily. And so the role of a person is going to significantly evolve in the future. And I feel the same way about talent acquisition as well, where what is the role of a recruiter in the process also, Where one recruiter is today able to do maximum, like, two or three screens in a couple of hours, but that's going to be so different when AI is able to take over all the interviews. And in fact, Mark, in the future.

But it's able to do a lot of their job. So the roles definitely are going to evolve, and that's just within the HR group. Right? And this would this is happening across the industry, across various roles for that matter. So, you know, the most important thing I feel is right now for us to take a step back and understand how is not so much how the workforce is evolving, but really how is what is the work that's happening across the organizations?

Where are all the silos? How are we breaking down all those silos? And how are we really looking at the workflows and how do you reengineer those workflows? And when you reengineer those workflows, you have to then think about, okay, whether a human needs to be involved or an agent needs to be involved in the process. And then that, I think, then gets to define what that future looks like.

But mainly, like, these are all the things I feel that are top of mind that we are trying to solve for today to build that workforce for the future.

Absolutely. I'll leave them anonymous, but I was actually talking to an HR professional yesterday, and we found ourselves talking about these AI capabilities at different levels of adoption. We kept bringing up white belt versus black belt. When you're a white belt in AI, it probably is easier to just think of it as AI is is going to be better at quote unquote empathy than humans. When you get to your AI black belt and you've really driven it through the organization, you don't believe that necessarily anymore.

What becomes the nuance of the situation is that AI can can be a kind of a a pair of empathy glasses that makes human callers. The the situation or for the context of the conversation, we'll say we were talking about call centers and particularly emotionally loaded call centers for loan applications. That can be, you know, really, really fraught and you need a lot of you you need a lot of sentiment analysis at least on the system side. But, you know, the person on the other side of the call made a really amazing distinction of, you know, when you're first starting out in these systems, it's easier to think of, oh, yeah. AI will be better at empathy than I am.

But when you get to the black belt and when you really are getting to the most advanced systems that are bringing the most out of your teams, at that point, you understand that AI no. It will never have empathy. It doesn't care when your birthday is. It's a system made to bring you when that birthday is, what's most important to this customer. But ultimately, empathy is going to reside in the human of deciding, well, I know because I'm a human and I'm putting myself in this person's shoes, the x y and z information, birthdays, you know, the last time they made a payment, whatever's the most relevant is going to be the most important to this customer, and that's always going that's going to be a human judgment call.

Even if, you know, the per the call center without those systems is going to seem so much more out of touch than than the ones that do. Just just in that framing of kind of white belt versus black belt and those misconceptions on the other side, even if it's kind of easier to think of it in the way that doesn't have a lot of nuance just saying, oh, AI will be better at empathy than us. What do you think are the big misconceptions about agentic AI? I think the the myth everybody tends to think is we're all gonna be robot commanders. Right?

Like, we're gonna have little armies of of agents underneath us, ones that can be spawned based on commands, and we'll have to usher those armies to do the jobs that, you know, tens of what whatever, however many, you know, human workforce and laborers would have had to do that work anyway. I don't think it's that simple. I don't think it's that zero sum. What do you think of those kind of, you know, misconceptions drawing around maybe this misplaced idea of even what agentic AI even is?

Yeah. That's a very good question, and I like the analogy that you used earlier. You know, a lot of people are asking the questions right now, like, you know, with kids who are college going for that matter. Like, what should I study? What am I what should I be learning for the future for that matter?

Right? What what should be my major for that matter? And one realization that I have come to and as I have sort of observed now now now having been in the technology industry for the past twenty plus years and having gone through the introduction of mobile move to cloud, like, all of these revolution revolutionary things, I do think that there are some skills that jump out for humans that are evergreen and I feel like would be more important in the future. So functional expertise, in my opinion, do not matter so much anymore and are not probably the skills of the future. So why would any company or any organization should be focused, for example, on hiring a financial analyst when there are so many tools who can actually get the job done?

Right? Core analyst job is what I'm talking about. However, in the financial analyst can really enhance the skills that are deeply human for that matter, which include things like a lot of curiosity, a lot of, learning agility, adaptability, collaboration, ability to, like, take a risk. What are these skills that are so evergreen that you are then able to ask the right questions, use the right tools that are in front of you or are available to you, connect the dots across various groups. That is what I feel will make humans highly valuable, not so much on, like, you know, going deep, deep, deep in a finance area or really being out in, like, you know, communications and marketing and so on and so forth.

So, of course, you bring a you bring your expertise and industry and companies are gonna rely on that, But it's really the deeply human skills. The more we are able to enhance them and use them, to our advantage, I think the more marketable and more valuable we are gonna be in the future.

While bringing up curiosity, which is a word I've heard every single episode that we've done on this subject, that that seems to be kind of the holy grail of what HR teams wanna bring out, especially in new hires. And I got a question about that in a second because it's always like kind of a a hall of mirrors trying to really nail down what does that look like on a resume? What does that look like in in work experience? But I actually wanna go back to, you know, a point that you were making before especially around prompt engineering. Jury is still out, but we've had folks come on the show and say, oh, don't don't don't go to school for prompt engineering.

It's not gonna last too many more years. I can't say that person's right with certainty. And in especially in hosting the show, my official position is I will see the downfall of whatever toe you're talking about when I see it. But let let's let's maybe assume for for a second that that person probably has some kind of point. Do you think that these incremental skills or they'll be phase skills, like this person thinks about prompt engineering, that will support AI in short terms as the technology we come to a growing understanding of it.

Also, we start to see adoption across industries and those changes that come about as I'd like to say on the show when all the houses on the street go from dial up to WiFi. And the culture changes because they have just a different connection to the Internet. As we start to see AI in these enterprises, even maybe before we get to agentic, but just even deterministic and generative across the board in ways we're we're not even seeing as of as of 2025. Do you think there's gonna be approach of, hey. We'll need these skills maybe for the next couple of years, but we'll always need curiosity, and we'll I'll save my question for for nailing that down.

What curiosity is on a resume once we get there. But do you think there's gonna be this kind of approach of, you know, short term skills for now and we're in the search of these kind of holy grail more ideological skills?

If I look at just even my own career for that matter, like, I don't come from a very traditional CHRO background. I have spent half my life, I would say, in HR technology and then the other half in the CIO world. And I can see that these these two areas are colliding right now, and so I feel like it's the best place to be, especially for some someone like me who's interested in both the worlds. But if I go even further back from that, I mean, I never imagined I'll work in tech. I, in fact, started my career as a developer, and now I'm doing HR.

So if I look at, like, really the evolution and my education actually was in, like, textile designing, food and nutrition. I did my bachelor's in BSc home science in India thinking that I'm gonna be a homemaker. So, you know, it's just like, I would say that it's only curiosity and learning agility that has at least helped me to learn on the job. Doesn't matter what the subject is. Because learning and then driving impact with that, that impact and that momentum is what builds confidence, I feel, in people.

And once you see once you build that confidence, you see the impact of the work and that helps build confidence. Once you build that confidence is what then really leads you to sort of, you know, do more with it. Right? And so I have always kind of I I feel lived my life with that in mind that as long as I am asking the right questions, not afraid of asking those questions. To me, personally, I don't think skills really matter, especially for someone who has pivoted career so many times for that matter.

Right? So so so anybody is able to jump in and learn anything as long as there is interest and curiosity and ability to sort of just go deep and learn, you know, ask the right questions for that matter. So not sure if I'm the best person to answer about that, but I just kinda look at my own career trajectory and my own, you know, learning over the years, and I and I and I truly live by that.

Absolutely. And I think you've done a a pretty halfway decent job of defining curiosity as it may show up on a on a resume right there of how well does this is this person asking the right questions no matter what situation or project that they're gonna put in. I'm gonna come back to that later too because I think that that still is worth pulling apart. But before we do, you've mentioned quite lot about humans in the loop, keeping humans in the in HR workflows in command even where we're seeing, agentic AI. I think that it tends to be, how most people envision the ethical challenges, especially around agentic systems of, you know, things can only go wrong if we're putting the keys in the hands of the system, before they're ready or before it's ready to be customer facing.

I I I don't think that's the only lens to really with which to really look at the ethical challenges, of Agentic, though. Just wondering what else outside of maybe humans in the loop or at least keeping human judgment at the forefront of these systems might equate to those ethical challenges, especially as we bring these systems more into the workplace.

Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, human in the lope, obviously, is the biggest principle that comes, guiding principle that comes to all of our mind, but there are many other, issues that I see with it. And many of them are, of course, related to data privacy. Right?

Like, everybody gets concerned about data privacy for that matter. I think pretty much every human and majority of the companies are putting a lot of information out there in their favorite tools right now. And so I do worry about what does that mean for our own company. For that matter, what data is getting out, how much people know about me. I mean, right now, if you do a simple search on just, you know, any of our names, a lot of information is out there for for us.

So it is it is an it is scary. It is scary for for everyone. And, the other day, honestly, someone was just looking for my address. I did not realize it. It is simple search for me on Gemini, and it was able to get my home address.

And now I have to go back and lock down many things thinking, gosh, like, you know, what all is out there? So it is definitely scary. I think reputational, you know, skills are there. Ethics are definitely top of mind for a lot of, HR leaders for that matter as well. But, you know, putting guardrails around it, like, really proactively thinking about things, especially at eight four, I see us do that quite a bit in terms of, like, all sorts of standards that are out there, putting that, you know, front and center to address a lot of these problems head on is really important, like, whether, know, the the things like ISO certifications, things like FedRAMP, things like GDPR.

Like, these things are all put in place for a reason, and we shouldn't be just thinking about skip skipping that. And and that way, I feel like for the for a lot of work that especially I feel we are doing here at Eightfold, I feel quite proud of how serious, you know, the company essentially takes responsible AI. I've educated myself just through that process, you know, as well in terms of how critical it is to build those guardrails around, like, reputation and privacy and so on and so forth. So super important is what I would stress.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I I think you've seen this most in the insurance industry of traditionally, we always think of, you know, oh, corporations are are only doing what the government is asking them to do or the regulators are asking them to do and and not an inch more. I come from a background of global taxes. You know, you only wanna pay, what you're what you're owed and not a penny more.

And I when you look at the insurance industry, it's completely different in that they are getting ahead of the regulations and making their models a lot more stringent and, pioneering safety measures that the that the regulators are not asking for, but only because they know there's tremendous relational, reputational risk if they're only doing the bare minimum or only doing, what the the regulations ask. And I I I think we see this across industries usually at this moment that gets talked about on the show and in so many conversations as moving from reactive systems to proactive systems. And we know this is coming to the HR space. Just wondering what that means for you in especially, you know, as we see call centers and other places in businesses that have traditionally always been thought of as admin functions or cost centers, and then them turning into strategic business drivers because we're driving such powerful technology in these places. What does that look like from your perspective on the HR side?

Good question. In many ways, I feel in at least, you know, over the years, HR can be either super strategic or sometimes, like, highly reactive as well. Industries evolve, technologies come in, and a lot of times, I see HR leaders really reacting to as a transformation is happening because it just either takes them from by surprise or probably sometimes, like, you know, me included, not super familiar with that technology for that matter or not very familiar with the impact that it's going to have. And so you find yourself in places where the the whether it's a technology leaders or industry subject matter experts sort of leading the way, and HR is responding to how to adjust to some of the things that, you know, that that companies are leading. I think that with AI, I feel that that's shifting quite a bit.

And the reason for that is HR leaders are not so much dependent on subject matter experts to derive insights for that matter. You are able to use the tools and explain to you in terms in business impact terms, and you can be ahead of the curve for that matter. If I use an example that we were talking about earlier, just like partnering and cocreating, for example, solutions, you know, with the with your peers for that matter. So I'm in a technology industry and worked, you know, I've I've done tech work on my own. However, as a role of the CHRO, if I am really able to work with our CTOs, our engineering leaders, our product leaders to co create solutions in terms of reengineering work, reengineering workflows, and keeping the reengineered work in mind, how the structures of companies are going to evolve or design is going to evolve for that matter, and really explain to these leaders, to my peers what the business impact of the changes that they are making is going to be on the design of the organization, on the impact that that organization is going to be able to drive, whether it's revenue or anything for that matter.

So I feel that AI empowers HR in many ways than any other technology in the past has because you now can have a lot of data, a lot of, insights and information on your fingertips and even concepts that have been very hard for you to understand or have not had the time to dive in and understand because simple search, simple just, you know, again, going back to a curiosity conversation, just ability to dive in, and kinda see things from business lens and then go and work with your peers to cocreate. It really gives you a seat at the table to, you know, to to drive business impact with the people that you're working with. So I find it to be highly, highly empowering.

Absolutely. You know, as I was switching the pages on my notebook here, and the audience is really familiar with this because I make such a a note of this as a almost a seeming anachronism on the show. Right? Like, here's a guy hosting an AI podcast and he's still writing everything down, with pen and paper. And a part of big part of the reason is ten years ago, cursive, which my generation grew up with, was under attack.

You know, there was a huge movement. Get it out of the schools. We need computer coding. Why are we teaching kids? You know, this this, you know, arcane and that was this is, you know, twenty twelve, thirteen.

And now looking back, I especially as we go into this AI future, I value my cursive education Mhmm. More than ever because manual processes and this is where you get into kind of black belt approaches to AI adoption. It's not that manual when you start at white belt, manual processes are the enemy, and you wanna get rid of all of them. Right? When you get to black belt, it's no.

You wanna choose which processes are manual so that they're forefront in your consciousness. And I've always seen cursive as a really great metaphor for that, and you never remember anything more than when you're writing it down in cursive. It's almost like you're writing it into your own brain, and that's what you want to do to keep, you know, information forefront in your carbon based human organic mind that has no buttons and hammers and whistles at least yet, and that'll be another podcast episode. But really interested, we've brought curiosity up a couple of times as this kind of golden goose skill that businesses are really really interested in defining. I doubt we're gonna you've done a very good job before as I noted, but I doubt we're gonna out with an Oxford English dictionary definition of of curiosity that every HR, leader tuning into the show can take home and then, implement at their workspace.

But maybe a bit bigger better question is how do we think of those skills in light of now kind of the lessons we learned about cursive and what skills are important and really last even if they seem a little anachronistic? How do we look at bringing those skills to the forefront and what might surprise a lot of HR leaders about what those skills are and how to measure them?

So I think curiosity or any of these skills for that matter show up in different ways. Now I also think, like, changing environments, for example, helps a lot for people. I mean, you you know, you know, you are the sum of five people that you spend time with. Right? And I'm a lot of us have heard this saying that you you're spending, you know, whoever, like, you you you spend time with people who work out a lot, you will end up working out a lot.

You spend time with people who read books a lot, you will end up reading a lot of books as well. And, you know, so on and so forth. There's so many such examples. So I think change of environment, mobility within functions and groups. Right?

All of these things really matter. So if I just kind of, you know, personalize it and give my own example of something like this that I have at least noticed. And then I see it, I can bring it to companies also and how, you know, I see them happen. Is actually, believed a lot in internal mobility when I was there. I spent seventeen years at Google.

And I joined them in very early stages of only about 3,000 people at that time. And by the time I moved out, there were a 160 some thousand people. And I think that what really what Google did beautifully at at that time was really hiring generalists, but then also enabling them to you know, really encouraging them to move from one group to the other. So as a person who was developing code or or I have you know, being in, customer success role, having been hired in the HR tech group at Google, which is just completely different, like, was a completely different way of thinking, a different environment, and a different function for that matter. From that moving to, you know, a CIO world or any other, for example, product area for that matter, As you move through environments and you move through functions, the kind of things that you pick up on or the kind of skills that you put pick up on is something that cannot be done when you're actually kind of, you know, consistently staying in one area, working under the same leader, working in the same industry for that matter.

Right. So changing your environment and changing your groups matter a lot. And when I, after leaving a large company, like, having worked for a startup for that matter, I felt was just so so different. I felt like the my my learning of one year at a start up was equivalent to my learning of five years at a large company for that matter. Right?

Because things were faster. You kind of look at things and, like, different dynamics. You're not necessarily working on one sliver of a problem statement on an area. You're looking for a business as a whole. You know, again, environment is different.

Large company versus small company for that matter. So environment also matters. And so people, I believe, who are pushing themselves, who are really, you know, have the not are not afraid of taking risks and are really pushing themselves into, you know, working with different type of people, people who are always better than you. Going back to our example about, you know, some of you are the some of my people you spend time with, like, always always hiring people who are better than you and surrounding yourself with folks who you would be learning from constantly as well. I think that is also a skill and a desire and something that you have to take a conscious effort in terms of moving around and and, you know, using that for that learning.

At Eightfold, I have seen that with some of our customers. Like, if you take Salesforce Salesforce as an example, they implemented one of our products. Earlier this year, they stopped hiring. And, because they wanted to really see essentially how if they're able to utilize, you know, their internal talent and redeploy them in many places. Going trying to remember the numbers, but I think they did 51% of their new hires through internal mobility within their organization.

And the way they did that was by using Eightfold's tool to essentially determine unique career paths for people. If you bring in a certain skill set or you've had you know, if you've done work in certain environments or you've done kind of, you know, had led a diff type of impact, how can AI essentially use to propose career paths for you which will not necessarily be so obvious to you as a human because, you know, we are trained to kinda think a certain way. I, I believe the internal mobility went up by 40% for that matter. So curiosity is definitely one thing, but I cannot highly rely on that learning agility risk taking for that matter as well where you have the confidence of, like, really changing your environment, throwing throwing yourself into something completely new, and you pick up skills, whether they are hard skills or soft skills, that would be really hard for anyone to do. Just kind of, you know, sticking and working in the same thing over and over again for many, many years.

Absolutely. Couldn't have said it better myself. And I really especially for someone whose resume is predominantly start ups in smaller companies. Your point about one year learning at a start up is like learning at five years at a larger organization. Yeah.

A big difference between driving a PT boat and driving an aircraft carrier. And only a few we've had more presidents who are captains of PT boats and smaller vessels than we've had presidents of larger vessels. But yes, yes, if if there's nothing else in terms of incremental advice that HR leaders can take from today's episode, it's hire from start ups those people really know how to handle challenges. I'm kidding. This this this was really a wide range of of advice for driving AI adoption in HR spaces.

Magna, really appreciate you being with us. Thanks so much for being on the show this week.

Thanks for having me, Matthew.

Wrapping up today's episode, I think there were three critical takeaways for enterprise leaders navigating data and AI in HR and workforce management. First, AI can dramatically enhance HR workflows from screening and interviewing candidates to mapping internal career paths, but human judgment remains essential in guiding decisions and maintaining empathy. Second, cultivating curiosity, learning agility, and adaptability in employees is more critical than functional expertise alone. As these evergreen skills enable teams to leverage AI tools effectively and pivot across changing business needs. Finally, proactive implementation of AI with clear ethical guardrails covering data privacy, bias mitigation, and responsible usage ensures that HR teams can scale their impact while maintaining trust and organizational integrity.

Interested in putting your AI product in front of household names in the Fortune 500? Connect directly with enterprise leaders at market leading companies. Emerge can position your brand where enterprise decision makers turn for insight, research, and guidance. Visit emerge.com/sponsor for more information. Again, that's emerj.com/sponsor.

I'm your host, at least for today, Matthew D'Amelo, editorial director here at Emerge AI Research. On behalf of Daniel Fagella, our CEO and head of research, as well as the rest of the team here at Emerge, thanks so much for joining us today, and we'll catch you next time on the AI in business podcast.