Kahuna

Kahuna keeps a record of which frontline and technical staff are qualified for which tasks. Most skills go onto that record only after a supervisor, an expert or a colleague signs off. Some go on after the person passes a quiz instead. Kahuna says AI cannot replace that human sign-off. Prices are on request. The hours staff spend on sign-offs cost money on top of the licence.

By Ashish Manchanda Published 16 Sep 2026 Last updated 25 Sep 2026
In one line

Kahuna is a skills record for frontline jobs. A supervisor or expert signs off most skills, and every sign-off carries a date.

Buy it if

You run hospitals, production sites or field crews. A regulator or auditor needs to know who is qualified for each task. Supervisors and educators can give time to the sign-offs.

Do not buy it if

You want software to work out people’s skills alone. Most of your staff are in office roles. Or you need a price published before a sales call.

Price

Price on request. The hours your own staff spend on sign-offs come on top of that figure.

How a skill gets onto someone’s record

Kahuna attaches skills, know-how and training to each person automatically. It reads their job role, location, job code, or any other field in your records. Nobody has to type this list in by hand. You then choose how each skill gets confirmed before it counts.

A supervisor or a subject expert can sign off a skill. A peer can review it, or someone can watch the person do the job. You can also count past experience, or run a quiz. Clinical staff have more ways to prove a skill. A preceptor can sign it off. A preceptor is an experienced clinician who supervises newer staff. A manager can also rate a clinical skill. People can also rate their own skills, and that may be enough for some skills. Other skills need a stricter review from a manager or supervisor. Each skill carries its own steps and its own proof requirements. A safety-critical task can demand more proof than a routine one. Kahuna sets no scale for how good someone has to be at a skill. Your team builds that scale, and decides how each confirmation runs.

Some proof comes from other systems, not from a person confirming it. Kahuna has a certified link to Workday. Training finished in Workday can count toward a person’s skill level. In healthcare, Kahuna also links to electronic health record systems. Experience recorded there can count toward recertification, the renewal of a certification. CertIQ is a tool inside Kahuna that launched on 19 March 2026. It reads a photo of a certificate, including the type, the issuer, the expiry date and the holder’s name. It approves a clear match straight away, and sends anything unclear to a reviewer you choose. You cannot buy CertIQ on its own. You have to buy it with Skills Manager, Ladder, or both. Those are two other Kahuna products.

What comes out is a record of who holds each skill, and who signed off on it. Each sign-off carries a date and the name of the person who made it. You can search all of it. A search tool called Talent Finder finds every person who meets requirements you set. 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. These include scheduling, dispatch, safety and compliance systems. It links by file upload or a direct connection.

Kahuna is not a learning platform. It works alongside your existing learning system. Kahuna records whether people are ready to work. It leaves course content to your learning system. Budget for Kahuna on top of that system, not instead of it.

Every entry on a Kahuna record has a named person behind it. That is what an auditor wants to see.

Kahuna quotes its price, and sign-offs cost staff hours on top

Kahuna publishes no price. It publishes nothing on whether the licence is charged per person, per module or per site. It says nothing on whether CertIQ costs extra. The one per-user dollar figure Kahuna does publish is a saving, not a price. Its CertIQ model says a company with 13,000 users saves about $741,000 a year. That works out to $57 a user, in staff time no longer spent tracking certificates by hand.

Budget for supervisor, educator and expert hours on top of the licence. None of that will appear on the quote. The person who runs the rollout needs time too. That time goes into sign-offs, the rollout itself, and the groundwork done before go-live.

Signing people off is a second jobKahuna, 2023

The people who sign off skills often hold another full-time role. Each skill you decide to confirm adds to a supervisor’s, preceptor’s or expert’s week. Kahuna’s own system does not require every skill to be confirmed. Skills marked not essential skip the confirmation step. Choosing which skills need confirming controls the hours this takes.

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

Yinson is an oil and gas company. Its Head of Crewing called the rollout “a lengthy process.” Kahuna supported the company through the rollout, Yinson said. Yinson started the work two years before its Brazil operations began. In November 2025, it said staff were still adopting the system. Yinson hired one person to lead the rollout. Put a named owner into the plan from the start.

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

At Wellstar, the first teams took a year to reach 80% compliance. Later teams reached the same rate in two months. Wellstar says this shows adoption was speeding up. Wellstar counted compliance by logins and completed orientation forms. That measures who used the system, not who was confirmed.

AdventHealth: the work starts long before go-liveAdventHealth

AdventHealth has more than 109,000 staff. It is presenting a session at Kahuna’s September 2026 user conference. The session covers how it is still building the groundwork for its skills-confirmation system. Its speaker says the change begins long before go-live. Getting there means building a skills framework, setting up the software, and connecting HR, learning and operational systems. It also means setting up how confirmations, job assignments and development plans work. Kahuna gives no timeline for this, because it depends on how complex an organisation is.

14 weeks instead of a typical 9 monthsSix energy programmes

Another session at the same conference points to a faster start. A skills adviser says six energy programmes, covering about 900 people, used AI to write their competency content. On average, those programmes went from first contact to real use in the field in 14 weeks. A typical programme takes 9 months. They also needed 84% less help from subject experts. First confirmations were done for up to 80% of the people targeted. Do not count this figure as Kahuna’s until Kahuna names the software.

Kahuna publishes no minimum company size and serves enterprise organisations. Its rollouts run large, with more than 14,000 nurses at Memorial Hermann. A rollout at UCHealth is set to reach more than 8,000 nurses. Nearly 14,000 people use it at VCA Animal Hospitals. Its case studies also describe two unnamed customers, with more than 50,000 and more than 55,000 staff. Nine of its new customers in 2025 were Fortune 500 companies. Kahuna groups its customers by industry, not by size. Request a reference customer close to your own headcount.

You would be signing with a company founded in 2018, based in Houston, Texas. Its co-founder and chief executive is Jai Shah. Resolve Growth Partners led its most recent funding round, $21 million, in November 2023. Before that, an earlier round came from Houston Ventures. Since then, customer Memorial Hermann made a strategic investment in December 2024. Stifel Bank gave it a line of credit 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 own count. It hired more than 25 people in 2025. It launched its Oracle partnership on 2 September 2026. It was still hiring for sales and customer success at the end of August 2026. No layoffs, sale or closure have been reported. Kahuna says it kept more than 90% of its customers for the seventh year running. It also added 20% more new customers in 2025 than in 2024.

You could also build this on your own systems. We have mapped what that looks like. See it as an agent

Most of Kahuna’s published figures come from unnamed customers

Kahuna publishes results on savings, audits and time to get someone qualified. A figure with a customer’s name on it is one that customer could confirm. Look for the name first.

$15 million saved, 4.2 million skill confirmationsIntermountain Healthcare

Kahuna says Intermountain Healthcare saved $15 million and ran 4.2 million skill confirmations. It also says Intermountain saved an average of 18.2 hours a user in repeat training. Intermountain is also a Kahuna partner that supplied a nursing skills framework. So a reference from Intermountain would come 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. An unnamed health system introduced that model, not Kahuna. The figure measures a staffing change at one employer, not a feature of the software.

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

Kahuna says an unnamed oil and gas company cut its audit prep time by 30 to 40%. A second result comes from an unnamed non-profit health system. It ran more than 3 million skill confirmations over six years. The Joint Commission accredits US hospitals. In that time, it found no fault with the health system’s digital skills records.

Six weeks of audit work in six minutesCertIQ

Kahuna says CertIQ turns six weeks of pulling audit records by hand into six minutes. That figure is for compliance directors managing thousands of staff. It also says CertIQ turns a photo of a certificate into a confirmed record in under 30 seconds. Setup for existing customers typically takes 30 to 90 days.

Four results from unnamed customersUnnamed customers

Kahuna says a field service company cut training spend by 21%, which contributed to $11.7 million in training savings. A digital commerce provider met its service promises 70% more often, saving more than $7 million. A health system saved $1.5 million by cutting the time to get a new nurse qualified by 5%. 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. That person said Kahuna “will act as our source of truth.” Get a result from Phillips 66 before you rely on that quote.

Kahuna suits audited frontline work with time set aside for sign-offs

Your auditor needs proof of who is qualified for each task

Kahuna is used in hospitals, health systems, refineries, field services and production sites. Its reports match standards set by OSHA and HSE. OSHA and HSE are the US and British workplace safety regulators. Its reports also match standards set by ISO and the Joint Commission. ISO is the international standards body. The record shows who signed each person off, and when.

If your nurse skills checklists are still on paper

Kahuna’s named nursing customers include Memorial Hermann Health System, UCHealth and Stanford Children’s. Clinical educators can keep the confirmations they already use once paper checklists move online. Each kind can be set up per skill. VCA Animal Hospitals uses it for an opt-in career growth programme, across almost 14,000 staff. So Kahuna also serves career growth, not only compliance.

Your HR system is Workday or Oracle Cloud HCM

Kahuna has a certified link to Workday that works both ways. It also has a link to Oracle Cloud HCM, live since 2 September 2026. Either way, skills your supervisors sign off can appear in the HR system your managers use.

You can free time for confirmations, and name an owner

Yinson’s Head of Crewing called its rollout lead vital. Give supervisors and educators hours for sign-offs. Name one person to lead the rollout.

Kahuna does not suit office roles, and exports need contract terms

You want software to work out skills on its own

Kahuna publishes no help centre or product documentation. It says AI can help, but not replace, the human sign-off on qualification. It says AI-only tools often miss the technical skills a job needs. If you want a full skills picture with nobody confirming anything, look elsewhere.

If most roles at your company are office-based, this may not fit

Kahuna is built for frontline and technical staff, not as a general HR system. Its own system splits skills into two kinds. Operational skills must be confirmed, but other skills need not be. For office roles, most skills would fall into that second group and skip confirmation.

You want your full history back when you leave

Kahuna aims to be the main record of who is ready to work. The record’s real worth is the dated history of who signed off on whom. Kahuna’s privacy policy treats you as the owner of your data. It lets a single person request their own personal data. That is different from handing an organisation its full records. Kahuna gives no period for how long data is kept after a contract ends. It publishes no terms for what you get back in bulk. Write a full export of every sign-off and its evidence into the contract. Also write in how long Kahuna keeps your data after the contract ends.

Your certificates would feed a shared pool across customers

CertIQ is built so every certificate any customer scans adds to one shared pool. Kahuna manages that pool centrally. CertIQ reads the holder’s name from each certificate. Get in writing whether names go into the shared pool, and whether you can opt out.

Two announced features are not built yet

Skills Aggregator is due in autumn 2026. It will roll detailed skills into broader groups, and push them into Workday and other HR systems. AlohaAI will let you put questions about skills data in plain English. It is on Kahuna’s roadmap. If either would change your decision, get a launch date written into the contract. If Kahuna will not commit to a date, decide based on what it does today.

Kahuna has passed a security audit called SOC 2 Type II every year since 2019. An outside, accredited auditor reviews how Kahuna protects customer data over time, and signs off on it. The record will hold named sign-offs on your own staff. Request Kahuna’s latest SOC 2 report before signing.

What to ask Kahuna before you sign

  1. For each skill in our framework, which confirmation would you set up by default? Which skills would you let people rate for themselves? Good answer: A skill-by-skill list, not one blanket answer for the whole framework.
  2. You use “learning inferences” to judge skill level, and “operational data” to set a starting point. What do these mean? Can either change a skill or a level without a named person signing off? Good answer: A plain explanation, and a clear no unless a named person signs off.
  3. For your last three rollouts our size, how long to reach 80% on a first confirmation? What did that 80% count? How many supervisor hours a year does that take to maintain? Good answer: Real numbers for customers our size, not an average across the whole company.
  4. Was the AI that wrote competency content for those six energy programmes your software? Is it part of the product we would buy? Good answer: A direct yes or no, naming the product.
  5. How is the licence priced, per person, per part of the product, or per site? Are Ladder and CertIQ priced separately from Skills Manager? Good answer: A written figure for our size, before the demo ends.
  6. Which health record systems does clinical experience data come from? What does Kahuna take from them? Good answer: The named systems, and the exact fields it reads.
  7. What do our scanned certificates add to the shared pool, including names? Can we opt out, and what happens to that data when we leave? Good answer: A clear yes to opt-out, and deletion of our data on request.
  8. When the contract ends, do we get back every sign-off, who made it, and the evidence attached? Or only what already flows into Workday or Oracle? Good answer: A full export written into the contract, not only what synced automatically.

Workera and iMocha test people, or keep today’s sign-offs with no software

Workera and iMocha test people directly. TechWolf and Microsoft People Skills pick up skills from daily work instead of requiring anyone to prove them. If Oracle is your HR system, look at its own Dynamic Skills tool before adding a second one.

If you want skills read from daily work, with nobody signing off, see our guide to skills intelligence software. It covers 18 products built that way. For a large organisation, it points first to TechWolf and Microsoft People Skills. By their own accounts, both work less well for frontline staff. Microsoft says its own performance may be limited for people who are not heavy Microsoft 365 users. Frontline and field roles are the example Microsoft names. It works out skills from Microsoft 365 only. TechWolf has its own case study at T-Mobile. There, employees choose whether to confirm the skills the software suggests. Company-wide, about 32% of staff have confirmed their own skills so far. Back-office roles do better, at about 70%. The gap is biggest in frontline retail and care work. TechWolf’s price is not published. Microsoft People Skills costs $0 extra, so far, on top of a Copilot or Viva licence.

Our guide places Kahuna among 22 products that test people, alongside Workera and iMocha. For roles that need no formal sign-off, the guide covers products that let people rate their own skills. It explains when self-rating is enough.

Oracle published a guide in October 2023. It says Dynamic Skills, Oracle’s own skills tool, comes at no additional cost for Oracle Global HR customers, so far. Kahuna’s new link feeds confirmed skills into Oracle Cloud HCM. Before paying for both, see whether Dynamic Skills already holds the records an auditor needs.

The last option is to buy nothing new. With Kahuna, supervisors and experts still do the sign-offs. What the software changes is how those sign-offs are assigned, recorded, found and shown to an auditor. Some companies run these sign-offs on paper or in spreadsheets today, and their auditors accept them. Weigh that improvement against the licence and the rollout hours. Only then decide whether 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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