Eightfold

Most of Eightfold’s published figures measure hiring, not skills

It fits large employers with heavy hiring and strict security needs

Skill levels stay out of match scores, and lawsuits are open

Eightfold prices every deal privately, with no published number

Its listing on Microsoft’s Azure Marketplace shows one plan, marked “for illustrative purposes only”. The first real number you see comes from a sales call.

One public contract shows the scale. The US Department of the Air Force paid $329,925.63 for one year. That was a fixed price, running from 24 September 2025 to 23 September 2026. The contract pays for a system that matches its people to jobs, assignments and training based on their skills. One buyer’s price for one year says nothing about what your company would be quoted.

If you already buy from Oracle or Microsoft, you have two other ways to pay. Oracle customers can pay for Eightfold’s AI Interviewer with Oracle Universal Credits. That is the prepaid balance Oracle sells for its cloud services. Eightfold has also been on the Azure Marketplace since June 2025. Both routes change how you pay, not how soon you see a price.

Eightfold publishes no minimum company size, seat count or contract value. Fortune 500 names sit on its customer list. More than 100 organisations used it by June 2025. It also ran a pilot in two Puerto Rican government agencies with under 300 employees. That pilot was the first stage of a planned system for 55 agencies. Get Eightfold to confirm on the first call that it sells to companies of your size.

If you are signing for more than a year, the company itself matters too. Eightfold is independent, with no parent company. No acquisition or layoffs have been reported. Its last announced funding round was a $220 million Series E in June 2021. That round valued the company at $2.1 billion. SoftBank Vision Fund 2 led it. Get its current funding position in writing.

What leaving costs depends on what Eightfold sits beside. It works alongside Workday rather than replacing it. It is not a learning system or an HR system. It has had its own applicant tracking system since May 2024. It also works with other tracking systems. Core employee records stay in the HR system. What you would lose is what Eightfold builds on top of them. That includes the filled-in skills, the ratings, the role levels and the match scores.

Eightfold’s contract gives you 30 days after the contract ends to ask for your data electronically. After that, Eightfold may delete it. Eightfold owns what it calls the “Anonymized Learnings” it creates from your data. It may use them to train its models. It also owns what it calls “Services Generated Data”.

What should you ask before you sign?

1. Your Digital Twin reads email, work apps and tasks. Do we buy it from you, or from Viven? How do the skills it captures reach a person’s profile? Good answer: One company’s name, in writing, in the contract.
2. Open one employee’s profile in front of us. Show us where each skill came from. It may be their CV, our HR system, or a skill inferred from similar careers. Also show us anything the employee added, a rating, or the Digital Twin. Can they see which is which, and delete one you worked out? Good answer: A clear label on each skill, and a way to remove one Eightfold added.
3. An expert and a beginner in a skill could get the same star rating. How should our recruiters read that rating? Good answer: A clear rule for recruiters on what the star rating does and does not mean.
4. How often does a skill you fill in turn out to be right? How do you measure that? Good answer: A tested percentage, and the customer it was tested on.
5. Do skills checked during hiring carry over into a new starter’s profile today? Good answer: Yes, and a plain description of how the handoff works.
6. Can you switch off gathering information from LinkedIn, GitHub and similar sites? We need this for candidates and employees separately, written into the contract. Good answer: A written setting we control, split between candidates and employees.
7. Your contract gives us 30 days after termination to ask for our data back. Which of the filled-in skills, the ratings and the match scores do we get, and in what format? Good answer: A written list of what counts as our data, in a file we can reuse.
8. Your contract makes us solely responsible for decisions made with your software. If the court in Kistler rules your scores are consumer reports, what changes, and who pays? Good answer: A written change to our contract, not just an assurance.

Gloat for a marketplace, TechWolf or Microsoft for skills from work

What replaces Eightfold depends on what you need. For an internal marketplace of jobs and projects, look at Gloat. For skills read straight from people’s day-to-day work rather than typed in, look at TechWolf or Microsoft People Skills. If you already run Workday, SAP or Oracle, that supplier sells its own skills tool too. Options include Workday Skills Cloud, SAP Talent Intelligence Hub and Oracle Dynamic Skills. Holding off on any purchase is a real option too.

If an internal marketplace is what you want, compare Gloat with Eightfold directly. Gloat brings career growth, projects, learning, mentoring and internal hiring together in one place. Eightfold offers employees a similar hub of jobs, projects, gigs and mentors. Both sell to large employers. Pick the one that fits your HR system and commits most in the contract.

TechWolf is a different kind of purchase. It reads work such as tickets, code and messages. It then feeds what it learns into Workday, SAP SuccessFactors or Oracle HCM. It leaves the decisions to the talent tools you already run. Eightfold, by contrast, brings its own matching, hiring and mobility tools. So the choice is between new tools that decide for you and better skills data in your current systems. Our TechWolf review sets out what it does.

Microsoft People Skills is worth a look if your people work day to day inside Microsoft 365. It reads that work for $0 extra, so far, on top of a Copilot or Viva licence. It reads what happens in Microsoft 365 only. Microsoft itself says it is not designed for promotion or pay decisions. Even so, it shows you what your own systems already know, before you spend time in a sales process. Our Microsoft People Skills review sets out what it costs in practice.

Read those suppliers’ licence terms closely. SAP’s own skills tool needs a separately purchased AI units licence, a paid add-on rather than something included as standard.

Buying nothing yet is a real option too. If your CVs, HR records and role levels are thin, Eightfold has little to work with. Getting them in order is work you would need to do first. Our guide to skills intelligence software walks through that first step.