Karat, the trusted standard for measuring talent quality, today announced the launch of Karat NextGen, the first human-led, AI-enabled talent evaluation solution to identify software engineers who will excel in the human + AI era.
According to Karat’s new 2025-2026 AI Workforce Transformation Report, the ROI of a strong engineer is expected to triple over the next three years thanks to advancements in AI. To capitalize on the growing productivity of human + AI engineering organizations, nearly 70% of engineering leaders plan to strengthen their AI capabilities through strategic hiring. Yet, almost two-thirds of companies still prohibit AI use in interviews, and less than 30% are updating assessments and training interviewers to identify AI-ready talent.
“Most companies are still hiring based on a pre-LLM rubric. In a world where people and AI work together, engineers need a wider range of skills, and the way we evaluate those skills needs to adapt,” said Jeffrey Spector, co-founder and president at Karat. “Karat NextGen reimagines the technical interview to mirror the way humans and AI work together, producing the strongest hiring signal and arming CTOs, CIOs, and VPs of Engineering with the data and benchmarks they need to make their most important talent decisions.”
Karat’s consistent and controlled dataset – drawn from over 600,000 interviews across industries – has helped global leaders like Atlassian, Duolingo, and PayPal define and measure engineering quality for more than a decade. Building on this depth of data and experience, Karat NextGen delivers a fully-managed talent evaluation solution for engineering executives that advances alongside AI to ensure they’re building teams with the skills required to meet the challenges of a rapidly evolving landscape.
Karat’s continuous development of fresh NextGen interview content is especially important in today’s era of rapid AI innovation.
“Frontier models are advancing so quickly that last month’s edge cases become this month’s baseline. This year, we’ve moved from autocomplete to agents that write and refactor entire libraries, and are increasingly seeing models explore entirely novel solutions to complex problems,” explained David Lau, VP of Engineering at OpenAI. “To ride this wave of AI momentum, organizations must continually re-evaluate how they empower great people with the latest models, and design their software, workflows, tools, and hiring processes to let humans and AI multiply each other’s impact.”
As software development evolves, getting interviewing right becomes far more complex. It’s not as simple as dropping AI into an IDE. Engineers need a realistic environment, questions AI can’t auto-solve, expert interviewers who can separate human skill from model output, and a structure to keep the process fair. Karat NextGen brings all of this together in a human + AI interview format where candidates tackle complex, multi-file projects with an integrated AI assistant while collaborating live with Karat’s expert Interview Engineers, who probe reasoning, trade-offs, and judgment in real time to reveal genuine engineering ability.
“AI is transforming engineering, but the real breakthroughs happen when human judgment and AI capabilities work together. What’s been missing is a way to measure that combination reliably,” added Sagnik Nandy, CTO at DocuSign. “A human-led, AI-native interview is exactly the kind of solution organizations need to understand who can truly excel in this new model of development.”
Karat NextGen is available today for enterprise and growth-stage engineering organizations worldwide.
- To request a NextGen demo, visit https://karat.com/nextgen/
- To download the 2025-2026 AI Workforce Transformation Report, visit https://karat.com/resource/AI-workforce-transformation
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