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Workday AI vs Eightfold vs Gloat: Which AI Talent Platform Actually Owns Workforce Intelligence?
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- Workday AI is embedded intelligence inside an HCM system of record , its power comes from clean transactional data, not standalone talent intelligence.
- Eightfold AI is the deepest skills inference engine in this market, built to map talent across the full lifecycle from sourcing through workforce planning using a global talent graph.
- Gloat is purpose-built for internal mobility and workforce agility , its AI connects employees to gigs, projects, and roles in ways Workday’s native tools do not match.
- All three can coexist: Eightfold and Gloat both integrate with Workday, and many large enterprises run one or both alongside it.
- The right choice depends on whether your primary gap is skills taxonomy, external talent intelligence, internal mobility adoption, or workforce planning depth.
Workday AI is the default intelligence layer for organizations already on Workday HCM. Eightfold AI wins when you need deep skills inference and cross-lifecycle talent intelligence that spans sourcing, internal mobility, and workforce planning. Gloat wins when internal mobility and workforce agility are the explicit business problem, especially for large enterprises with complex internal talent markets. Most Workday shops that deploy Eightfold or Gloat do so to fill gaps Workday’s native AI does not cover, not to replace it.
Why Most Buyers Misframe This Comparison
The most common mistake enterprise HR buyers make when evaluating these three platforms is treating them as direct substitutes. They are not. Workday is an HCM platform with an AI layer. Eightfold and Gloat are AI-native talent platforms that were designed from day one to sit on top of, or alongside, a system of record like Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, or Oracle HCM.
The consequence of misframing this is real. Teams issue RFPs that ask Workday, Eightfold, and Gloat to compete for the same “AI talent platform” budget line. Workday wins on consolidation grounds, and eighteen months later the team is still manually maintaining a skills taxonomy in a spreadsheet. If you have read our comparison of Workday AI vs SAP Joule vs Oracle AI for HR, you already know how Workday’s embedded AI stacks up against other HCM suites. This comparison is different. Here the question is whether Workday’s AI goes deep enough on talent intelligence, or whether a specialist platform earns a second seat at the table.
By the end of this article, you will have a clear mental model for what each platform actually owns in the workforce intelligence stack, where each one falls short, and who should be writing each vendor a check.
What Is “Workforce Intelligence” and Why Does the Definition Matter?
Workforce intelligence means different things depending on which vendor is defining it. For the purposes of this comparison, it covers four distinct capability layers:
- Skills inference and taxonomy: Can the system infer skills from unstructured data (resumes, job histories, learning completions) and maintain a live, dynamic skills graph without manual administration?
- Talent supply and demand modeling: Can the system model internal talent supply against future role demand, including scenario planning for headcount changes or skill gaps?
- Internal mobility and workforce agility: Does the platform actively surface opportunities to employees and connect people to projects, gigs, and roles they would not have found otherwise?
- External talent intelligence: Can the system benchmark internal talent against the external market, inform sourcing strategy, and enrich workforce plans with labor market data?
Workday AI, Eightfold, and Gloat each own different pieces of this stack. Mapping which platform owns which layer is the core of this comparison. If you want a broader breakdown of these categories as distinct disciplines, our piece on people analytics vs workforce analytics vs talent intelligence lays out the definitional differences in detail.
What Does Workday AI Actually Do for Talent Intelligence?
Workday AI operates as an intelligence layer woven across the Workday HCM, Talent, and Workforce Planning modules. It does not exist as a standalone product you can buy separately. Every AI feature Workday ships, from skills recommendations to career pathing to attrition prediction, draws from the data already living in your Workday tenant.
That is both its greatest strength and its clearest limitation. If your Workday data is clean, current, and consistently maintained, the AI performs well. If your job architecture is inconsistent, your skills profiles are incomplete, or your performance data is sparse, Workday’s AI has little to work with. Garbage in, garbage out applies here more aggressively than with specialist platforms, because Workday does not ingest external talent data to compensate for internal data gaps.
Workday Skills Cloud
Workday Skills Cloud is the foundation of Workday’s talent intelligence story. It uses a machine learning model to build a dynamic skills ontology, inferring relationships between skills and suggesting them to employees based on job role and profile data. The ontology is shared across Workday customers, meaning the model learns from patterns across the platform’s installed base.
In practice, Skills Cloud works well for organizations with mature Workday deployments and reasonable employee profile completion rates. For organizations where employees have not kept their profiles current, Skills Cloud surfaces what Workday already knows rather than what employees actually know. That is a meaningful gap when you are trying to build a workforce plan on top of it.
Workday Talent Marketplace and Career Hub
Workday’s internal mobility play comes through Talent Marketplace, which surfaces gig opportunities, projects, and open roles to employees based on their skills profiles. Career Hub aggregates career development resources, mentoring connections, and opportunity matching in a single employee-facing interface.
The product works within the Workday experience, which is a meaningful advantage for adoption in all-Workday organizations. The downside is that Talent Marketplace tends to surface what HR has explicitly configured rather than autonomously discovering and matching talent across the organization. The curation burden stays with HR admins.
Workday Workforce Planning and Prism Analytics
Workday’s workforce planning module connects headcount modeling, financial planning via Workday Adaptive Planning, and talent data in a way no standalone talent intelligence platform can replicate. This is the strongest argument for keeping workforce intelligence inside Workday: when the financial plan and the people plan live in the same system, scenario modeling is genuinely faster.
Workday Prism Analytics allows organizations to blend external data sources into Workday reporting, which partially addresses the external market data gap. However, the labor market intelligence depth Prism provides still does not match what Eightfold’s talent graph delivers for benchmarking and sourcing strategy.
What Does Eightfold AI Actually Do for Talent Intelligence?
Eightfold AI is a purpose-built talent intelligence platform. Its core product is a deep learning model trained on a large global talent graph, designed to infer skills from unstructured data and match people to opportunities, roles, and career paths across the full talent lifecycle. Eightfold covers talent acquisition, internal mobility, workforce exchange (contingent labor), and workforce planning from a single skills-unified platform.
The key architectural difference from Workday AI is that Eightfold is not dependent on clean internal profile data to function. Its models infer skills from resumes, job histories, and job descriptions by learning from patterns across a much larger external dataset. An employee with a sparse Workday profile still gets a richer Eightfold skills profile because the model draws on comparable career trajectories at scale.
Eightfold’s Deep Matching and Skills Inference
The depth of Eightfold’s skills inference is the most commonly cited advantage in enterprise evaluations. Practitioners who have evaluated both Eightfold and Phenom have noted that Eightfold wins on skills depth and geographic skills data, though both platforms come at significant cost. The inference model does not require employees to manually tag their own skills, which is the single biggest driver of skills data quality failure in self-service systems.
Eightfold’s approach to bias mitigation is also worth noting. The platform uses a “skills first” matching model that is designed to surface candidates based on demonstrated and inferred capability rather than credential-based filtering. The company has faced scrutiny on algorithmic bias, which is a legitimate concern for any AI at this scale. Any enterprise deploying Eightfold should conduct pre-deployment audits aligned with their own compliance requirements. For teams evaluating that risk dimension, our comparison of AI HR compliance and bias audit tools covers the leading third-party audit options.
Eightfold Talent Acquisition vs. Internal Mobility
Eightfold’s talent acquisition module competes directly with ATS-adjacent sourcing tools by applying its talent graph to external candidate matching, CRM, and pipeline building. Its internal mobility module surfaces internal candidates for open roles and career path recommendations for employees. Both modules draw from the same underlying skills graph, which is the architectural advantage: a candidate you sourced externally two years ago who was not hired can be matched against an internal opportunity today without any manual data reconciliation.
The breadth of Eightfold’s lifecycle coverage creates a real trade-off for buyers. The platform tries to do a lot, and some modules are more mature than others. Teams that primarily need deep internal mobility and workforce agility often find Gloat’s product depth in that specific use case exceeds what Eightfold’s internal mobility module delivers.
Does Eightfold Integrate with Workday?
Yes. Eightfold has a documented integration with Workday HCM that synchronizes employee data, job requisitions, and skills data bi-directionally. According to Eightfold’s partner documentation, the integration is designed to let Workday remain the system of record while Eightfold operates as the intelligence layer on top. Many large enterprises run this configuration: Workday for HR operations and compliance, Eightfold for talent intelligence and matching. The integration quality matters a lot in practice, and organizations should stress-test the data sync frequency and field mapping during proof of concept.
What Does Gloat AI Actually Do for Workforce Intelligence?
Gloat calls its product a Workforce Agility Platform. The positioning is deliberate. Gloat’s AI is designed to solve a specific organizational problem: large enterprises have talent locked inside role definitions and org-chart hierarchies, and that talent goes invisible to the rest of the organization. Gloat’s internal talent marketplace surfaces employees to opportunities, projects, gigs, and lateral moves they would never find through a traditional job posting system.
Where Eightfold builds a deep talent intelligence graph that spans the entire talent lifecycle, Gloat goes deep on the internal mobility and workforce agility use case specifically. It is more focused, and in enterprise deployments where internal mobility is the primary problem to solve, that focus shows in product depth and adoption metrics.
Gloat’s AI Talent Marketplace and Workforce Graph
Gloat’s AI matches employees to opportunities based on skills, experience, and career aspirations. The employee-facing experience is consistently rated as more intuitive than Workday’s Talent Marketplace in head-to-head comparisons. According to G2’s comparison of Gloat vs Workday HCM, reviewers rated Gloat easier to use for internal mobility use cases than Workday’s native capabilities.
The workforce graph Gloat builds from internal activity data — applications to gigs, skills signals from project participation, mentoring connections — creates a dynamic picture of internal talent that grows richer over time without requiring employees to maintain profiles manually. This behavioral data layer is something neither Workday nor Eightfold replicates in the same way for internal talent specifically.
Gloat’s Agentic HR Direction
Gloat has moved into the AI agents space, announcing agentic HR capabilities designed to automate talent decisions and workforce actions. Gloat is entering the growing market of AI agents in HR with a workforce agility angle, competing with platforms that approach the same space from an HR service delivery direction. The Gloat for Workday agentic integration is a specific product investment connecting Gloat’s marketplace to Workday’s HCM workflows.
For buyers evaluating the AI agents angle, our guide on AI HR agents for CHROs and people ops leaders provides a framework for evaluating agentic HR claims without getting swept up in vendor positioning.
Does Gloat Integrate with Workday?
Yes, and it is one of Gloat’s explicit product investments. Gloat offers a documented Workday integration that pulls employee data from Workday HCM and surfaces internal opportunities within the Workday experience in some configurations. The integration is mature enough that Gloat has publicly positioned a dedicated “Gloat for Workday” product integration. Organizations should still validate data sync depth and the degree to which Gloat’s marketplace activities write back to Workday’s skills and talent records.
Head-to-Head: Workday AI vs Eightfold vs Gloat Across Workforce Intelligence Layers
| Capability | Workday AI | Eightfold AI | Gloat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Skills inference from sparse data | Moderate (relies on profile completion) | Strong (infers from unstructured data and global talent graph) | Moderate (infers from internal activity signals) |
| Skills taxonomy depth and breadth | Good within Workday Skills Cloud | Among the deepest for cross-lifecycle skills ontology | Good for internal mobility context |
| Internal mobility AI matching | Available via Talent Marketplace; admin-dependent | Strong; shares skills graph with external pipeline | Purpose-built; deepest product depth here |
| Employee experience for opportunities | Functional within Workday UX | Good; less employee-facing focus | Strong; rated highest for employee UX |
| External talent intelligence / benchmarking | Limited (Prism can ingest third-party data) | Strong (global talent graph with external market data) | Weak; primarily internal focus |
| Workforce planning integration | Strong (native to Workday Adaptive Planning) | Good (integrates with Workday; less native) | Moderate |
| Talent acquisition AI | Available; not the primary product strength | Strong (full ATS-adjacent sourcing and matching) | Not a core product area |
| Standalone purchase option | No (requires Workday HCM) | Yes | Yes |
| Workday integration | Native | Documented, bidirectional | Documented, Workday-specific product investment |
| Pricing model | Quote-based (part of Workday HCM contract) | Quote-based (enterprise only) | Quote-based (enterprise only) |
How Do These Platforms Handle Skills Taxonomy Differently?
Skills taxonomy is where the architectural differences between these three platforms matter most for long-term value. A skills taxonomy is not just a list of skills. It is a dynamic model of how skills relate to each other, how they evolve over time, and how they map to roles, career paths, and business outcomes.
Workday Skills Cloud maintains a shared ontology across its customer base, updated by Workday’s data science team. The advantage is that customers do not build their taxonomy from scratch. The disadvantage is that the taxonomy reflects Workday’s model of the world, not your organization’s specific job architecture. Heavily customized job structures, niche technical roles, or industry-specific skills can fall outside what Skills Cloud handles well without significant configuration effort.
Eightfold builds its skills ontology from a global talent graph trained on hundreds of millions of career profiles. The model can infer skills relationships that no human-curated taxonomy would include, because it learns from actual career trajectory data at scale. This is genuinely different from a vendor that hired taxonomy experts and built a skill tree manually. The downside is opacity: when Eightfold’s model infers a skill or a skill adjacency, the reasoning is not always transparent to HR administrators who want to audit or override it.
Gloat’s skills model is more internally oriented. It learns from your organization’s data: what skills employees have, what opportunities they pursue, how projects and gigs are described internally. Over time, this creates a skills model that is well-calibrated to your organization’s actual language and structure. For organizations with idiosyncratic job architectures or proprietary technical roles, this can produce more accurate matches than a global talent graph that was not trained on your industry’s terminology.
Which Platform Wins for Internal Mobility: Workday, Eightfold, or Gloat?
Gloat wins the internal mobility comparison at enterprise scale. Its product was built specifically for this problem, and the employee experience, matching depth, and workforce agility framework reflect years of focused investment in that one use case. Our comparison of AI internal mobility platforms covers Gloat alongside other specialist options including Fuel50, 365Talents, and Phenom, which is useful context if internal mobility is your primary evaluation criterion.
Workday’s Talent Marketplace is the right answer when your organization is all-in on Workday and the goal is adoption without adding another system. The UX lives where employees already work, and the integration overhead is zero. The product’s limitation is that it surfaces what HR has configured, not what the organization’s talent graph would surface autonomously. For organizations where internal mobility is a strategic priority rather than a feature request, that gap matters.
Eightfold’s internal mobility product is strong, but its primary differentiation over Gloat is the integration with external talent pipeline data. If the goal is to answer both “who should we move internally” and “who should we hire externally to fill this gap,” Eightfold answers both questions from the same model. If the goal is purely internal mobility adoption and workforce agility, Gloat has the stronger purpose-built product.
What Is the Real Implementation Cost and Complexity for Each Platform?
All three platforms are expensive to implement. None has a self-service onboarding path for enterprise deployments. Pricing for Workday AI is bundled into Workday HCM contracts, which are quote-based and vary significantly by module, seat count, and contract term. Eightfold and Gloat are both enterprise-only and quote-based; none of the three vendors publishes list pricing. Implementation timelines for Eightfold in a Workday environment involve data integration scoping, skills taxonomy alignment, and change management work that typically runs several months for large organizations. Organizations replacing or augmenting an existing Workday deployment should plan for a longer integration timeline and involve their Workday implementation partner early. Our list of top Workday consulting firms includes partners with specific experience in Eightfold and talent intelligence integrations.
Practitioners evaluating Eightfold against other enterprise talent platforms have noted that both Eightfold and Phenom carry significant price tags at enterprise scale. That pattern is consistent with what you would expect from platforms positioned exclusively for large organizations, though specific contract values are not publicly disclosed.
Gloat’s implementation complexity is similar. The product is not a plugin. It requires data integration with your HCM, change management to drive employee adoption, and configuration of the opportunity marketplace to reflect your organization’s actual internal mobility patterns. The workforce agility framing requires organizational readiness, not just technical readiness. Companies that deploy Gloat without a clear internal mobility program to support it tend to see low adoption regardless of the AI quality.
For organizations managing a multi-platform HR stack and planning a talent intelligence layer addition, our HR software implementation checklist covers the data migration, integration, and rollout planning steps that apply regardless of which platform you choose.
Eightfold vs Gloat: How Do They Differ as Workday Add-Ons?
When both are evaluated as Workday add-ons, the comparison simplifies considerably. Eightfold adds external talent intelligence, deep skills inference, and cross-lifecycle talent matching to a Workday deployment. Gloat adds internal mobility depth, workforce agility, and a better employee-facing opportunity experience to a Workday deployment.
Some large enterprises deploy both alongside Workday. The use cases do not significantly overlap in practice. Eightfold handles talent acquisition intelligence, career pathing depth, and workforce planning enrichment. Gloat handles the active internal talent marketplace and workforce agility program. Workday remains the system of record and handles compliance, payroll, and core HR operations. This three-platform configuration is expensive and requires disciplined data governance to avoid skills data fragmentation across systems.
Organizations choosing between Eightfold and Gloat as a single Workday add-on should ask one clarifying question: is the primary problem external talent intelligence and skills depth across the full lifecycle, or is it internal mobility adoption and workforce agility? The answer points clearly to Eightfold or Gloat respectively. Our deeper comparison of talent intelligence platforms vs internal talent marketplaces makes this structural distinction in detail.
Where Does Workday’s Native AI Fall Short?
Three gaps in Workday’s AI show up repeatedly in enterprise evaluations.
First, skills inference quality degrades when employee profile data is incomplete. Workday does not have an external talent graph to compensate. Organizations with low profile completion rates, high turnover, or a large contingent workforce find that Skills Cloud’s recommendations become thin quickly.
Second, Workday’s AI recommendations are built around Workday’s data model. Skills, roles, and career paths that do not map cleanly to Workday’s taxonomy require manual configuration that HR admins rarely have the bandwidth to maintain. The result is a skills taxonomy that grows stale within twelve to eighteen months of go-live.
Third, Workday’s AI lacks external labor market intelligence at the skills level. You cannot ask Workday’s native platform “are we behind the market on machine learning engineering compensation relative to skill depth” or “what is the supply of qualified candidates for this role profile in the Texas market.” Prism Analytics can ingest third-party data to partially address this, but it requires sourcing and integrating that external data separately, which most organizations do not do systematically.
None of these gaps means Workday AI is insufficient for typical talent management use cases. For an organization that runs Workday well, keeps profiles current, and has a mature job architecture, Skills Cloud and Talent Marketplace deliver genuine value without adding a second platform. The gaps matter when the ambition is workforce intelligence at the level of strategic workforce planning, skills-based organization transformation, or talent supply and demand modeling.
How Should Enterprise HR Buyers Evaluate These Platforms Against Their Own Needs?
The right evaluation framework depends on where your organization sits on the workforce intelligence maturity curve. For buyers still building that evaluation process, our AI HR vendor evaluation checklist covers the fifty questions CHROs should ask before any AI HR platform purchase, including questions specific to skills data governance and integration depth.
Four questions drive the decision:
- Is Workday your system of record? If yes, both Eightfold and Gloat have viable integration paths and the question is which capability gap to fill first.
- What is your primary workforce intelligence gap? Skills inference and external talent data points to Eightfold. Internal mobility adoption and workforce agility points to Gloat. Workforce planning integration points to staying in Workday and improving data quality.
- What is your change management capacity? Deploying a second or third talent platform without the organizational change management to drive adoption produces shelfware at enterprise prices. Gloat especially requires an active internal mobility culture to deliver value.
- What is your data governance posture? Running three skills models across Workday, Eightfold, and Gloat without a clear data governance framework creates fragmentation that undermines every platform’s quality over time.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Eightfold integrate with Workday HCM?
Yes. Eightfold has a documented bidirectional integration with Workday HCM that synchronizes employee records, job requisitions, and skills data. Workday remains the system of record, and Eightfold operates as the intelligence layer on top. According to Eightfold’s partner documentation, the integration is designed for enterprise deployments where both platforms run in parallel. Integration depth and data sync frequency should be validated during any proof of concept, as performance varies based on tenant configuration.
Is Workday AI good enough, or do enterprise organizations need Eightfold or Gloat?
Workday AI is sufficient for standard talent management workflows if your Workday data is well-maintained and your workforce intelligence ambitions are moderate. It falls short when you need deep skills inference from sparse data, external labor market benchmarking, or a purpose-built internal mobility experience that drives active employee participation. Organizations with strategic skills-based workforce transformation goals or large internal talent markets typically need a specialist platform alongside Workday, not instead of it.
What is the difference between Eightfold and Gloat?
Eightfold is a full talent lifecycle intelligence platform with deep skills inference, talent acquisition, and workforce planning capabilities powered by a global talent graph. Gloat is a workforce agility platform built primarily for internal talent marketplaces, connecting employees to gigs, projects, and roles within large organizations. Eightfold wins on external talent intelligence and skills inference depth across the hiring lifecycle. Gloat wins on internal mobility UX, employee adoption, and workforce agility program support. Many large enterprises deploy both alongside Workday for different use cases.
Who uses Eightfold AI?
Eightfold counts large enterprises across technology, financial services, healthcare, and retail among its customers. The company has publicly referenced customer deployments at large-scale organizations, though specific customer names and counts vary by disclosure. Eightfold is most commonly deployed as an enterprise talent intelligence layer alongside an existing HCM system like Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, or Oracle HCM. It is not typically the right fit for organizations under a few thousand employees due to implementation cost and complexity.
What is the Eightfold AI controversy about?
Eightfold has faced questions about algorithmic bias in its AI matching models, a concern that applies broadly to any AI system making consequential hiring or career decisions at scale. The company has published information about its approach to skills-first, de-biased matching. Enterprise buyers should conduct their own algorithmic audits using third-party tools before deployment, particularly if operating in jurisdictions with AI hiring regulations. The concern does not make Eightfold more risky than other large-scale talent AI platforms, but it reinforces the need for pre-deployment bias testing on your own data.
Is Gloat better than Workday’s Talent Marketplace?
For internal mobility specifically, Gloat is the stronger product. According to G2’s comparison of Gloat vs Workday HCM, reviewers found Gloat easier to use for internal mobility workflows. Gloat’s AI autonomously surfaces opportunities to employees based on behavioral signals, where Workday’s Talent Marketplace relies more on HR admin configuration. The trade-off is that Gloat adds cost, integration overhead, and change management complexity. For organizations where Workday’s Talent Marketplace already meets adoption goals, adding Gloat is not justified.
How do these platforms handle skills data governance across multiple systems?
Skills data governance across Workday, Eightfold, and Gloat is genuinely complex and underestimated in most evaluations. Each platform maintains its own skills inference model, and without explicit data governance policies, organizations end up with three diverging skills records for the same employee. The standard approach is to designate Workday as the system of record for skills data and treat Eightfold and Gloat as inference and matching layers that write enriched data back to Workday on a defined cadence. This requires active integration maintenance and periodic reconciliation audits.
What does Gloat’s agentic HR integration with Workday do?
Gloat’s agentic Workday integration is designed to automate talent marketplace actions within Workday HCM workflows, allowing the Gloat AI to trigger and surface opportunities as part of existing HR processes rather than requiring employees to visit a separate platform. According to Gloat’s documentation on their Workday integration, this reduces the context-switching friction that typically depresses internal talent marketplace adoption. The agentic capability is relatively new and organizations should validate specific workflow automation claims during procurement rather than assuming feature completeness from marketing materials.
The Bottom Line on Workforce Intelligence Ownership
No single platform owns the full workforce intelligence stack. Workday owns the system of record and the workforce planning integration. Eightfold owns deep skills inference and cross-lifecycle talent intelligence. Gloat owns internal mobility adoption and workforce agility at enterprise scale. These are genuine product differentiation claims, not just positioning language.
The practical question for most enterprise HR buyers is not which platform to choose but which gap to fill first. If your Workday skills data is stale and your workforce planning is built on assumptions rather than skills signals, Eightfold solves the data quality problem from the bottom up. If your internal mobility program exists on paper but employees never use it, Gloat solves the adoption problem that Workday’s Talent Marketplace has not fixed. If you are still deciding whether to invest in specialist talent intelligence at all, the honest answer is that many well-run Workday shops do not need a second platform yet — they need to use what they have already paid for more effectively.
