For decades, organizations have been divided into tidy silos: Finance tracked money, Sales tracked customers, and HR tracked people. We treated these domains as separate, static records.
That era is over.
AI is collapsing these artificial boundaries. As intelligent systems and AI agents become more involved in how companies make decisions and get work done, they need more than access to data. They need to understand the organization they are operating within.
Who works where. What skills and capabilities exist. How teams are structured. Where there is capacity. How work gets done.
The smarter AI becomes, the more valuable that context becomes.
The new scarcity is not AI. It is context. That is the shift I believe will define the next era of enterprise software.
Key takeaways
- Trusted people context is HiBob’s starting point. Workforce data becomes more valuable when it helps organizations understand their people, teams, skills, roles, capabilities, and how work gets done.
- Organizational Intelligence is the bigger opportunity. Connecting trusted people context with relevant business information can help organizations understand what is happening, make better decisions, and act with greater confidence.
- The future will be open and increasingly agentic. Making trusted people context available across systems, workflows, and agents will enable organizations to rethink how work gets done.
- Workforce orchestration is the longer-term opportunity. As AI becomes part of the workforce, organizations will need better ways to understand how work should be divided between people and AI.
- Salesforce’s investment is a powerful signal that this shift is accelerating. Salesforce led a $166 million investment alongside Farallon Capital Management, giving HiBob additional fuel to build toward this vision.
AI’s advantage comes from trusted people context
As AI models and agents become more capable and widely available, intelligence itself will become less differentiated.
What will matter is whether that intelligence understands the environment in which it is operating.
An AI system can tell you what to consider when hiring for a new role. That recommendation becomes far more useful when it understands the capabilities already inside the organization, the team’s capacity, the manager’s span of control, and the skills the business will need next.
The same principle applies far beyond hiring. A recommendation about entering a new market is more valuable when it reflects the people, skills, leadership, and capacity the organization can actually bring to that opportunity.
The advantage will not come simply from access to AI. It will come from giving AI the comprehensive workforce data it needs to be relevant, accurate, and actionable.
Turning workforce data into Organizational Intelligence
Consider what we traditionally mean by workforce data. A person’s title is useful HR information. But their title alone does not tell you what they can do, which skills they have, how their team works, what goals they are responsible for, where they have capacity, or how their work contributes to a broader business outcome.
That is trusted people context.
And this is where HiBob has a differentiated starting point. We already sit close to the workforce, with a trusted understanding of the people, teams, skills, roles, and relationships that make an organization work. When that context is connected to broader business information, it can help answer questions far bigger than traditional HR ones.
It can help organizations understand whether to hire or redeploy, whether they have the capabilities to enter a new market, why one team consistently outperforms another, where AI is creating impact, and how work should be divided between people and agents.
These are critical business questions.
This is where Organizational Intelligence comes in. It is the ability to use trusted people context, together with relevant business information, to understand what is happening across an organization, make better decisions, and act with greater confidence.
For HiBob, Organizational Intelligence starts with what we already know best: people.
Moving beyond system of record
At HiBob, we started by building a modern people platform and a trusted system of record for the workforce. That foundation matters because Organizational Intelligence is only as useful as the data and context behind it.
Our advantage is not simply the amount of workforce data we hold. It is the richness of the relationships within it: people and teams, skills and roles, managers and performance, goals and capacity.
The opportunity goes well beyond adding more AI to HR software. It is about making the context already held within the workforce useful wherever organizations need to understand their people and make decisions.
Why the Salesforce investment matters
Today, we announced that Salesforce is investing in HiBob. This is a major milestone for the company, but I believe the more important point is what the investment says about where technology is heading.
Salesforce sees the value of what HiBob has built today: a global customer base, sustained growth, deep customer loyalty, strong leadership, and continued innovation.
Our growing work with Slack, including our MCP relationship, has given Salesforce a closer view into HiBob’s trajectory and the opportunity created when trusted people context moves beyond an HR application and into the systems where work actually happens.
I see the investment as a powerful signal that the market is recognizing the strategic importance of trusted people context in the AI era.
It also gives us additional fuel to accelerate what comes next across product, technology, AI, and innovation.
Organizational Intelligence has to be open
Organizational Intelligence cannot stay inside the HR application.
The future of enterprise software will not be one system containing everything. Companies will continue to rely on specialized systems for finance, CRM, collaboration, and operations, while AI agents will increasingly work across them.
That creates a new requirement: trusted people context needs to move with the work.
We’re building an open platform to make that possible, bringing trusted people context into the systems, workflows, and agents where decisions happen.
Our growing work with Slack and MCP is an example of what this can look like in practice, bringing trusted people context closer to the conversations, workflows, and tools where work actually happens.
We do not need to own every system. We need to help those systems understand the organization better.
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Looking at the long-term: workforce orchestration
As AI agents increasingly participate in work, organizations will need to rethink how work is allocated.
Some work will be performed by people, some by AI, and much of it by both working together. Leaders will need a clearer understanding of what work needs to be done, what capabilities it requires, who owns the outcome, and how impact is measured.
This is where workforce orchestration begins.
It will require workforce data to understand how work, capabilities, and accountability fit together across the organization.
Workforce data’s next role
Every organization is unique. Its people, capabilities, relationships, culture, structure, decisions, and ways of working are what make it different.
As AI becomes more capable and more deeply embedded in work, that uniqueness becomes an asset.
For years, workforce data helped companies manage their people. Its next role is bigger: helping companies understand what they are capable of, where their workforce can create the most value, and how people and AI can work together most effectively.
That is the future of work we see at HiBob. And I believe it will become one of the defining capabilities of the AI enterprise.
Read the full announcement and learn more about Salesforce’s investment in HiBob here.