Kahuna

Kahuna keeps a record of which frontline and technical staff are qualified for which tasks, in hospitals, refineries, field services and production sites. Most of the ways a skill gets onto that record involve a supervisor, a subject expert or a colleague checking it, or the person passing a quiz, and Kahuna argues that AI cannot replace that human check. Kahuna’s price is not published, and the time of the people doing the checking comes on top of the licence fee.

By Ashish Manchanda Published 16 Sep 2026 Last updated 16 Sep 2026
In one line

A competency record for regulated frontline work, built by supervisors and experts signing people off, with a dated trail of who checked whom.

Buy it if

You run hospitals, production sites or field crews, an auditor or regulator asks who is qualified for which task, and you can give supervisors and educators the time to do the sign-offs.

Do not buy it if

You want software to work out people’s skills on its own, most of your workforce is in office roles, or you need a published price before you talk to a salesperson.

Price

Kahuna does not publish a price, so you have to ask for one, and the hours your own staff spend on checks come on top of whatever figure it gives you.

How it works

How a skill gets onto someone’s record

Kahuna starts from the skills, competencies and training each job requires. Those requirements are attached to people automatically, from their job role, location, job code or any other field in your records, so each person’s list follows their role rather than being typed in by hand. You then choose how each skill is checked before it counts.

The checks on offer are sign-off by a supervisor or subject expert, review by a peer, observation on the job, recognition of experience and quizzes, and for clinical staff there are also validations led by preceptors (experienced clinicians who supervise newer staff), manager evaluations and experience logs. Self-assessment is available too, and may be enough for some skills while others need a stricter check by a manager or supervisor. Each skill can carry its own steps, prerequisites and rules for what counts as equivalent, so a safety-critical task can demand more proof than a routine one. Kahuna leaves you to set the proficiency scale and decide how assessments are run, with no default scale of its own, so both decisions sit with your team before the first check counts.

Some of the evidence arrives from other systems rather than from an assessor. Through Kahuna’s certified Workday integration, learning completed in Workday counts toward a person’s proficiency. In healthcare, Kahuna links recertification to experience recorded in the electronic health record, so ask whether it connects to yours. CertIQ, a module launched in March 2026, reads the type, issuing body, expiry date and holder name from a photo of a certificate, can approve the matches it is confident about straight away, and sends mismatches to a reviewer you designate. CertIQ cannot be bought on its own: it has to be used alongside one or both of Kahuna’s other two modules, Skills Manager and Ladder.

What comes out is a record of who holds which skill and who checked it. Each check is time-stamped, attributed to the person who made it and searchable, and a search called Talent Finder picks out the people who meet a given set of requirements. Parts of that record reach your other systems: skills and proficiency flow into Workday and, since 2 September 2026, into Oracle Cloud HCM, and CertIQ sends certificate data back to HR systems including Workday, SAP, Oracle, UKG and ADP. Kahuna also connects to HR and learning systems and to operational tools such as scheduling and dispatch, safety and compliance systems, by file upload or a direct connection.

Kahuna is not a learning platform: it works alongside your learning system, recording whether people are ready and building checks into daily work, and leaves the course content to the systems you already have. That means you would budget for Kahuna in addition to your learning system rather than instead of it.

Every entry on a Kahuna record has a named person behind it, which is what an auditor wants to see, and each of those names represents time taken from someone’s working week.

Money, time and size

The price you have to ask for, and the hours you have to find

Kahuna publishes no price, and nothing on whether the licence is charged per person, per module or per site, or whether CertIQ costs extra on top of the module it has to be bought with. The only per-person dollar figure Kahuna publishes is a saving rather than a price: its CertIQ model estimates that an organisation with 13,000 users saves about $741,000 a year, or $57 per user, in staff time no longer spent tracking and checking certificates by hand.

Because Kahuna’s approach rests on people checking people, the licence is only part of what you pay. The rest is the time of the supervisors, educators and experts doing the checking, and of whoever runs the rollout, and none of it will appear on the quote. The time goes into sign-offs, the rollout and the groundwork before go-live.

Signing people off is a second jobKahuna, 2023

The people with the knowledge to assess and sign off technical competencies rarely have that as their only job, and most fit it around a full-time one. Every skill you decide must be checked becomes a claim on a supervisor’s, preceptor’s or expert’s week. In Kahuna’s own framework, skills that are not essential to operations do not need to be validated, and deciding which skills fall on each side of that line is the most direct way to control the hours.

Yinson: “a lengthy process”Yinson, oil and gas

At Yinson, an oil and gas customer, the Head of Crewing called the implementation a lengthy process and said Kahuna supported the company through all of it. Yinson started the work two years before its operations in Brazil were due to begin, and in November 2025 it said adoption across its employees was still under way. Yinson also hired one person to lead the rollout, so if you go ahead, put a named owner into your plan from the start.

Wellstar: 80% in a year, then 80% in two monthsWellstar Health System

At Wellstar the first groups took a year to reach 80% compliance and later teams reached the same rate in two months, which Wellstar presents as a sign that adoption was speeding up. Wellstar counted compliance by who had logged in and by the share of electronic orientation documents completed. Those measures count people using the system rather than people checked, so when a reference customer quotes you a percentage, ask what it counts.

AdventHealth: the work starts long before go-liveAdventHealth

AdventHealth, which has more than 109,000 team members, is presenting a session at Kahuna’s September 2026 user conference on how it is still building the organisational foundation for competency management, and its speaker says the change begins long before go-live. Implementation includes defining a skills framework, configuring the platform, connecting your HR, learning and operational systems, and setting up how checks, assignments and development plans work, and Kahuna gives no timeline because that depends on how complex your organisation is.

14 weeks instead of a typical 9 monthsSix energy programmes

A session at the same conference points to a faster start. In it, a competency adviser reports that six energy programmes, covering about 900 people, used AI agents to write their competency content and went from first engagement to use in the field in 14 weeks on average, against a typical 9 months. The programmes needed 84% less involvement from subject experts, and first assessments were completed for up to 80% of the people targeted. The session does not name the software that did the AI work, so ask whether it was Kahuna’s.

So budget in two parts: the licence, which you will have to ask for, and the hours of the people who check others, which the licence does not cover. Ask Kahuna for both figures from customers of your size before you compare it with anything else.

Kahuna sets no minimum company size and serves enterprise organisations. Its deployments are large: more than 14,000 nurses at Memorial Hermann, a rollout at UCHealth set to reach more than 8,000 nurses, nearly 14,000 people at VCA Animal Hospitals, and case studies of unnamed customers with more than 50,000 and more than 55,000 employees. Its new customers in 2025 included nine Fortune 500 companies. Kahuna groups its customers by industry rather than by size, so ask for a reference customer close to your own headcount.

You would be signing with a company founded in 2018 and based in Houston, Texas, led by its co-founder and chief executive, Jai Shah. Its most recent funding round, of $21 million, was led by Resolve Growth Partners in November 2023, after an earlier round from Houston Ventures, and it has since taken a strategic investment from its customer Memorial Hermann in December 2024 and a credit facility from Stifel Bank in January 2025. Kahuna publishes no amount for the earlier round, the Memorial Hermann investment or the Stifel Bank facility, so its total funding is not known. It had 50 staff in December 2023, by its chief executive’s count, and hired more than 25 people in 2025. It launched its Oracle partnership on 2 September 2026 and was hiring for sales and customer success at the end of August 2026, and no layoffs, acquisition or shutdown has been reported. Kahuna says it kept more than 90% of its customers for the seventh year running and added 20% more new customers in 2025 than in 2024.

There is a second route to this. The same job, built on the systems you already run, is usually a narrower piece of work, and we have mapped what that version looks like. See it as an agent

Its figures

What its figures measure

Kahuna publishes results on savings, audits and time to competence. A figure with a customer’s name attached is one you can check by asking that customer, so look for the name first.

$15 million saved, 4.2 million validationsIntermountain Healthcare

Kahuna credits Intermountain Healthcare with a $15 million saving, 4.2 million validations and an average of 18.2 hours per user saved in repeated training. Intermountain is also a Kahuna partner, which supplied a nursing competency framework, so if it is offered to you as a reference, you would be hearing from a partner as well as a customer.

90% decrease in nurse turnoverKahuna and Mercer white paper

The white paper ties this result to a job-share model that an unnamed health system introduced, so the figure measures a staffing change at one employer rather than a feature of the software.

30 to 40% less audit preparation, and no Joint Commission findingsAudit readiness

Kahuna credits the 30 to 40% reduction in audit preparation to an unnamed oil and gas company. The other result comes from an unnamed non-profit health system that ran more than 3 million competency assessments over six years, and in that time the Joint Commission, which accredits US hospitals, made no finding on its digitised competency content. Neither customer is named, so ask Kahuna for a reference who can speak to audit results.

Six weeks of audit work in six minutesCertIQ

CertIQ turns six weeks of pulling audit records together by hand into six minutes for compliance directors managing thousands of staff, and goes from a photo of a certificate to a verified record in under 30 seconds. CertIQ launched on 19 March 2026, and it typically takes 30 to 90 days to switch on for existing customers, so ask how many customers have had it running long enough to measure results like these.

$11.7 million, more than $7 million, $1.5 million and 20% less time to competenceUnnamed customers

Kahuna says a field service organisation cut its training spend by 21%, which contributed to $11.7 million in training savings, and a digital commerce provider improved service-level compliance by 70% and saved more than $7 million. It also says a health system saved $1.5 million by cutting time to competence in nurse orientation by 5%, and a healthcare organisation saw time to competency fall by 20% after adopting Kahuna’s mobile app.

In the energy sector, Kahuna quotes the Chief Human Resources officer at Phillips 66 saying Kahuna “will act as our source of truth”, so ask to speak to Phillips 66 about how that turned out.

Fit

Who it suits

An auditor asks who is qualified for which task

Kahuna is used in hospitals and health systems, refineries, field services and production facilities, where readiness, safety and regulatory compliance are critical. Its reporting is aligned with the safety, quality and accreditation standards set by OSHA and HSE, the US and British workplace safety regulators, by ISO, the international standards body, and by the Joint Commission. When the question is who signed this person off and when, the dated record of each check answers it.

Your nurse competency checklists are still on paper

Kahuna’s named nursing customers include Memorial Hermann Health System, UCHealth and Stanford Children’s. It supports the checks clinical educators already use, including preceptor-led validations, peer reviews, experience logs and manager evaluations, each set up per competency, so your educators can keep the kinds of check they already run when the checklists move off paper. VCA Animal Hospitals uses it for an opt-in career progression programme across a population of nearly 14,000, so it serves development as well as compliance.

You run Workday or Oracle and want checked skills in it

Kahuna has a certified Workday integration that works in both directions, and an Oracle Cloud HCM integration that went live on 2 September 2026. Either way, the skills your supervisors sign off can appear in the HR system your managers already use.

You can give assessors time and name an owner

Kahuna’s approach relies on experienced staff having time set aside to check others. Yinson hired one person to lead its implementation, and its Head of Crewing called that person vital. If you can give supervisors and educators hours for sign-offs and put one person in charge, you have what the approach needs.

Limits

Where it stops

You want skills worked out for you

Kahuna argues that AI can augment, but not replace, the human check on whether someone is qualified, and says AI-powered platforms often fall short at validating the technical skills operations need. If you want a skills picture of the whole company without asking anyone to check anything, you need a different kind of product.

Most of your people are in office and professional roles

Kahuna is built for frontline, technical workforces rather than as a general HR platform. Its framework splits skills into operational ones, which must be validated, and non-operational ones, which need not be. For office roles whose skills that framework would count as non-operational, you would be paying for a checking system to hold skills it treats as needing no validation.

You need every change to a record signed by a person

Kahuna uses “learning inferences” among the ways it assesses competency, and “operational data” as part of how it sets a trusted baseline, without defining either, and it publishes no help centre or product documentation. Ask whether either can change what someone’s record says without a named person signing it off, since a named person behind each check is what you would be paying Kahuna for.

You want your full history back when you leave

Kahuna aims to be your system of record for workforce readiness, and the most valuable thing it holds is the dated history of who checked whom, built up one check at a time. Some of it already leaves: skills and proficiency flow into Workday and Oracle, and certificate data goes back to your HR system. The privacy policy treats you as the owner of your data but gives no period for how long it is kept after a contract ends, and Kahuna publishes no terms for what you get back in bulk. The same policy gives individuals the right to export their own personal data, which is a different thing from a promise to hand your organisation its records. Write a full export of every check, sign-off and piece of evidence into your contract, so the history you have built up leaves with you.

Your certificates would feed a shared pool

CertIQ is designed so that every certificate scanned by any customer adds to a shared repository Kahuna manages centrally. CertIQ reads the holder’s name from each certificate, so ask whether names go into the repository, whether you can opt out, and what happens to your contribution when you leave.

A product on the roadmap would sway your decision

Skills Aggregator, which will roll detailed skills up into broader capabilities and push them into Workday and other HR systems, is due in autumn 2026. AlohaAI, which will let you ask questions of your skills data in plain English, is on Kahuna’s roadmap. If either would sway your decision, get a release date for it written into the contract, and if Kahuna will not commit to one, decide on what the product does today.

Kahuna has held SOC 2 Type II certification, from an accredited third-party auditor, since 2019. SOC 2 Type II is an independent audit of how a company protects its customers’ data over a period of time. The record will hold named sign-offs on your staff, so ask Kahuna for its current SOC 2 Type II report before you sign.
Before you sign

What to ask Kahuna

  1. For each skill in our framework, which kind of check will you set up by default, and which skills would you let people rate themselves?
  2. What exactly are “learning inferences” and “operational data”? Can either change a skill or a level on someone’s record without a named person signing it off?
  3. How many supervisor and administrator hours a year do customers like us spend keeping records current? Show us real figures, anonymised if you need to.
  4. For your last three rollouts at our size, how long did it take to get 80% of the workforce through a first check, and what did that 80% count?
  5. Six energy programmes presented at your conference used AI agents to write their competency content and went from first engagement to use in the field in an average of 14 weeks. Was that your software, and is it in the product we would buy?
  6. How is the licence priced: per person, per module or per site? Are Ladder and CertIQ priced separately from Skills Manager?
  7. For our clinical staff, which electronic health record systems does the experience data come from, and what information does Kahuna take from them?
  8. What do our scanned certificates add to your shared repository, including names? Can we opt out, and what happens to that data when we leave?
  9. When the contract ends, do we get back every check, who signed it off and when, and the evidence attached, or only what already flows into Workday or Oracle? Will you put that in the contract?
Other options

Alternatives to Kahuna, including buying nothing

The closest alternatives to Kahuna are Workera and iMocha, which test people, TechWolf and Microsoft People Skills, which work skills out from people’s work, and Oracle Dynamic Skills if you already run Oracle. Keeping the checks you run today, with no new software, is the other route.

If what you want is skills worked out from the work people already do, our guide to skills intelligence software counts 18 products that do this and, for a large organisation, suggests starting with TechWolf and Microsoft People Skills. By their own accounts, both find the kind of workforce Kahuna serves harder to read. Microsoft says People Skills’ performance may be limited for people who are not heavy Microsoft 365 users, giving frontline and field workers as its example, and it works out skills from Microsoft 365 only. In TechWolf’s own T-Mobile case study, where employees choose whether to confirm the skills suggested for them, confirmation sits at around 32% across the company and about 70% in back-office functions, with the gap concentrated in frontline retail and care. TechWolf’s price is not published, and Microsoft People Skills costs $0 extra, so far, with a Microsoft Copilot licence or certain Viva licences, but an organisation that has Microsoft 365 without Copilot or Viva does not get the AI that works out skills.

If what you want is tested skills rather than signed-off ones, the same guide places Kahuna among the 22 products that test people, alongside Workera and iMocha. For roles whose skills do not need a formal sign-off, it also sets out the products that ask people to rate their own skills, and finds that for most mid-market problems that approach is the right one.

If you run Oracle, look at what it already includes before adding a second system. In Oracle’s October 2023 guide, Dynamic Skills, Oracle’s own skills module, comes at no additional cost for Oracle Global HR customers, so far. Kahuna’s new integration feeds its checked skills into Oracle Cloud HCM, so before paying for both, ask Oracle whether Dynamic Skills can already hold the records your auditors need.

The last option is to buy nothing new. With Kahuna your supervisors and experts still do the sign-offs, because its whole approach rests on people checking people, and the software changes how those checks are assigned, recorded, found and shown to an auditor. If your checks already happen on paper or in spreadsheets and your auditors accept them, price that improvement against the licence and the rollout hours before you decide it is worth buying.

Sources and method Everything here about Kahuna comes from Kahuna’s own material unless we say otherwise: its website, FAQ, product and industry pages, newsroom, blog, privacy policy, a product datasheet, a customer webinar transcript it published and the agenda for its 2026 user conference. What Kahuna publishes about its own product is taken as its description of that product. The staff figure and the source of the earlier funding round also come from a December 2023 InnovationMap article, and the job openings from Kahuna’s own job board. Where we say Kahuna does not publish something, such as a price, a minimum company size, a default proficiency scale, product documentation or terms for returning your data, we checked all 160 pages and blog posts listed in its website’s sitemap. For news of layoffs, an acquisition or a shutdown we searched Google News. Kahuna Workforce Solutions has no SEC filings, so no public filing confirms its funding amounts, and it has been awarded no US federal contracts. The TechWolf, Microsoft and Oracle figures come from the sources listed below, which our other guides to skills intelligence software also use.
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