JD Durkin: Ronni Zehavi joins us now. He is both Co-Founder and CEO of HiBob. I’m really grateful for a few minutes of your time. Ronni, nice to see you here today.
Ronni Zehavi: Nice to meet you.
JD Durkin: I know you’ve said that AI’s real advantage is not necessarily smarter systems, it’s smarter organizations. What do you mean by that? What does that actually look like in practice?
Ronni Zehavi: That’s the billion-dollar question, I believe, for every organization. AI forces every company, every management team, to think about the way they redesign the way they work.
So it’s not only about the technology breakthrough, it’s how organizations react to the change. And I’m talking about employees, line managers, executives. And our mission at HiBob is to give the platform that will allow customers’ organizations to do this transformation.
JD Durkin: So what does organizational intelligence actually look like to you, and what should people know about that key theme if this is maybe the first time that they’re actually hearing of it?
Ronni Zehavi: It’s based on three buckets. One is the data and the context of the data. When I mean context, I mean a human context and organizational context. That’s the moat of our records when we serve our customers.
The second bucket is the intelligence layer, how we connect data within the platform, and we connect the data to other systems or frameworks, combining those data into one data lake and coming up with insights and recommendations.
And the third bucket is the actionability. So it’s not only about showing you the analysis, but also recommending you what to do.
JD Durkin: So where do you see the line here? You’ve got artificial intelligence on one side, human accountability on the other. Maybe for a lot of firms, they’re struggling to try and split the difference between the two. How do you see the relationship between those two working side by side?
Ronni Zehavi: Humans will be the ones that will drive the change. Managers will have the new mission to basically understand how to combine digital workers and humans. And I believe people-first was, and is still going to be, the number one objective for businesses.
JD Durkin: Through the spirit of true, good-faith organizational intelligence, what are the sorts of things that employees, maybe companies themselves, should be doing to become smarter about actually harnessing these underlying technologies? Because this technology is here to stay, it’s disruptive and it’s changing very quickly.
Ronni Zehavi: Everything goes back to the management team and the line managers. They are the change agent in every disruption. And yet again, with AI, their job is to make sure that they know exactly how to balance between running humans and embedding AI as part of work.
We see companies already doing the shift. Some of them are only experimenting, and some of them are only hearing the noise from the party and have not yet joined.
JD Durkin: And you have a New York Stock Exchange-listed software giant that I know you just started business with. That’s Salesforce, of course. What does that relationship, that investment into HiBob, really validate for you? And what does that allow you to build next that maybe you could not quite do previously?
Ronni Zehavi: So there’s only one Salesforce on the planet and one Marc Benioff. It’s a great statement and great validation about the company, about our technology, about our vision.
I think we both agree, and we share the same ideas, that humans and agents will collaborate. We both believe that to be had this experience. We both believe that the brain is the game changer when it comes to organizational intelligence, and we’re happy to collaborate with them.
And I think the $166 million investment is a great validation for our business.
JD Durkin: Congratulations on that investment and all the success. I always say it’s a great interview when I’m out of time, but I still have more topics that I want to get to. That means you have to come back sometime. It’s nice to see you here today. Thank you so much.
Ronni Zehavi, Co-Founder and CEO of HiBob.
