AI has no shortage of data. The harder question is whether it understands what that data means inside a business.
That distinction sat at the center of a conversation with HiBob Co-Founder and CEO Ronni Zehavi at Unleash Paris. It also helps explain Salesforce’s $166 million investment in the HR technology vendor, announced in September.
HiBob says the funding will support its evolution from an HR platform into an organizational intelligence layer that brings trusted workforce information into the systems where employees already work.
For Zehavi, the issue is not simply giving AI access to more data. It is giving it context.
TL;DR
HiBob argues that raw employee data does not give AI enough understanding to support sound business decisions.
Salesforce’s investment backs HiBob’s ambition to connect workforce context with collaboration, finance, CRM, and operational systems.
HR teams should assess whether their data is structured, connected, and trustworthy before scaling AI initiatives.
Why Is Context More Valuable Than Raw HR Data?
Context turns individual data points into information that leaders can act on. Zehavi argued that an employee’s title, address, or employee number has limited value in isolation. The useful layer comes from understanding reporting lines, skills, team relationships, and the business question being asked.
Zehavi said:
“Data by itself is not enough. The context is relevant.”
Zehavi compared the difference to reading a book. Letters alone do not carry the story. Readers need words, sentences, pages, chapters, and a narrative to understand what they are seeing.
In an HR setting, that could mean identifying the right people to consult on a proposed market expansion, rather than simply retrieving a list of employees. The quality of the answer depends on structured and normalized data, Zehavi said.
How Could Connected Data Change HR’s Strategic Role?
HiBob’s position is that HR data should not sit apart from the rest of the organization. Zehavi said the next phase requires connections between people data and systems used by finance, sales, marketing, and operations.
HiBob has already launched a Slackbot HCM integration that it says lets users access Bob’s people data and complete HR tasks within Slack. The company says the integration uses Model Context Protocol to connect Slackbot with Bob.
