The Next Phase of Ashby: Key Announcements from Ashby One

Today at Ashby One, we brought together ~700 customers and prospects in San Francisco and over 1,500 more virtually for our fourth product keynote.

Each year, this moment is a chance to share what we’ve been building — and more importantly, how we’re thinking about the evolving state of hiring.

Over the past year, our business has grown from 2,400 to over 4,400 customers with >100% revenue growth across startups, mid-market, and enterprise segments. At the same time, we’ve scaled the team across engineering, product, and customer success to continue raising the bar on both product velocity and customer experience.

This growth reflects something we think about constantly: how to build a system that keeps up with how quickly hiring is changing.

Everything we announced at Ashby One ties back to that.

How we build at Ashby

Before getting into specific product announcements, I wanted to share a bit more about how we approach building.

Over the past 12 months, we’ve shipped more than 130 core improvements and new features. That means you’re seeing a meaningful change in Ashby at least every 3 days.

This pace is intentional, and it comes from a few core decisions:

• We organize product teams around real recruiting workflows (ATS, Scheduling, CRM, Analytics)
• We build everything on a shared platform layer — reporting, automation, customization, and now AI
• We stay deeply connected to customers through constant feedback loops and design partnerships

One important extension of this philosophy is how we think about serving both startups and enterprise companies.

Building for enterprise pushes us on scale, governance, and flexibility. Building for startups pushes us on speed, usability, and strong foundations. Together, they make the product better for everyone.

That shows up across both the day-to-day experience of using Ashby and the needs of our most complex customers.

The result is a system that can grow with you — without needing to be replaced as your company scales. The outcome is less time in change management, and more time building a robust hiring system.

The next generation of AI in Ashby

AI was a major focus of this year’s keynote — but not as a standalone feature set.

Over the past year, AI has dominated nearly every conversation in our industry. New tools are emerging quickly, and expectations for what recruiting teams can automate or accelerate are changing just as fast.

But most AI in hiring today still lives in isolated tools, disconnected from the systems where the actual work happens. That creates a gap between what AI can do and what teams can reliably use in practice.

Our approach is different.

We’ve always built Ashby as a unified system where your CRM, ATS, scheduling, analytics, and workflows all live on top of the same data foundation. That matters even more in an AI-first world, where the quality of AI is directly tied to the quality and completeness of the data underneath it.

This unique position allows us to:

• Apply AI across the entire hiring process, not just one step
• Use real context (interviews, feedback, emails, pipeline data) instead of isolated inputs
• Build features that are not only powerful, but reliable and safe to use in real workflows

This is also why we’re seeing a very specific pattern in who is choosing Ashby.

Today, 70% of Forbes’ top AI startups use Ashby — up from 50% last year.

These companies are building the next generation of AI products — and they’re choosing Ashby to build their teams.

It’s a strong signal that the same foundation that makes Ashby effective today is also what makes it well-positioned for what comes next.

With that context, here are the key AI announcements from this year’s keynote.

AI Talent Rediscovery

We introduced AI Talent Rediscovery, which allows you to automatically surface high-potential candidates from your existing database.

Instead of starting from scratch, you can:

• Identify warm leads, silver medalists, and high-fit candidates
• Leverage past interviews, feedback, and hiring signals
• Take action immediately within your existing workflows

Ashby Assistant and Custom Agents

We launched the Ashby Assistant, a conversational interface that can answer questions and take actions across your entire recruiting dataset.

You can generate pipeline updates, draft emails, and interact with your data in a much more natural way.

Alongside it, we introduced Custom Agents, which allow teams to package complex workflows into reusable, standardized prompts.

The Assistant is also available in Slack, bringing Ashby into the tools your team already uses.

Open Ecosystem: MCP Server

We also announced our upcoming MCP Server, which allows external AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude to interact directly with Ashby.

This makes it easier to build custom workflows and extend Ashby into your broader AI stack.

Scheduling Agents

Finally, we previewed Scheduling Agents.

Instead of automating individual steps, these agents take full ownership of scheduling — coordinating candidates, interviewers, and reschedules from start to finish.

This is a shift from task-based automation to fully managed workflows.

AI Interviewer and the Talent Llama acquisition

At the end of 2025, we acquired Talent Llama and began rebuilding their product natively inside Ashby as our new AI Interviewer.

AI Interviewer allows you to:

• Run structured, conversational AI interviews
• Evaluate candidates with strong signals
• Review results directly within your existing pipeline

A key focus here is candidate experience. The interviews are designed to feel natural, responsive, and human — not scripted or robotic.

We’re rolling this out in private beta and will continue refining it closely with customers.

You can join the waitlist here.

More broadly, this acquisition reflects how we think about building:

• A unified platform, not disconnected tools
• Deep integration into existing workflows
• Long-term investment in core hiring infrastructure

Expanding beyond hiring: People Workflows

The final theme of the keynote was expanding Ashby beyond traditional ATS boundaries.

We believe there’s a significant gap in what happens after a candidate is hired — especially in onboarding.

To address that, we introduced People Workflows.

People Workflows allows you to:

• Automate and scale the new-hire onboarding process
• Coordinate across teams like recruiting, HR, IT, and hiring managers
• Trigger tasks, communications, and data flow automatically
• Maintain a high-quality experience after offer acceptance

We’ve been developing this over the past year and already have more than 25 early access customers using it.

Where we’re headed

If there’s one theme across everything we announced, it’s this: hiring is evolving quickly, and the systems supporting it need to evolve just as fast.

And all of this is not possible without a unified data architecture.

Our focus is on building a deeply integrated platform that continuously evolves through fast iteration on customer feedback:

• Keeps up with changes in technology
• Supports companies from their earliest stages through enterprise scale
• Extends across more of the talent lifecycle over time
• Provides a single source of truth across every hiring and onboarding activity

We’re excited about what’s ahead — and to keep building it alongside all of you.