Visier gives organizations a Workforce AI Edge: a set of AI-powered capabilities that help leaders understand the relationship between people and work, elevate the productivity of their employees, and win by adapting to change faster. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Visier chief innovation officer Adam Binnie to learn more about the company.
Adam Binnie’s Background
What is Adam Binnie’s background? Binnie said:
“I’ve been deeply ingrained in the analytics industry since 1991 – in essence from its earliest days with market leaders in the BI space, first at a UK-based startup, then at a company that was later acquired by Crystal Decisions, that morphed into Business Objects, and ultimately became SAP. My entire career has been at the forefront of innovation, exploring new technology, and developing new products. I joined Visier 10 years ago, where I was involved in shaping the direction of our company from there I moved into a chief product role to redefine our platform and expand our portfolio from our initial solution, which was largely talent-centric, to a more broad-based articulation on how to solve people challenges, connecting people to business outcomes.”
“My role today is focused on our long-term product strategy and forging strategic partnerships. I am empowered to explore how we transform our business—make a step change by leveraging our relationships with some of the most significant companies in the world to bring our unique IP to a larger audience as quickly as possible.”
Favorite Memory
What has been Binnie’s favorite memory working for the company so far? Binnie reflected:
“I don’t know if I can limit it to only one memory after more than a decade with this company. My first thought is a series of moments that are indicative of the explosive growth we’ve realized. Seeing how our presence has expanded at events like HR Tech and Unleash Paris for me represents our impact on the market. It’s been fascinating to see ourselves expressed as leaders in those environments, with so much visibility, and with our customers fully engaged with us on our journey as we continue to innovate, it’s been really impactful.”
“And then I’d say another memory that stands out is the moment Ju Wu, our GAI leader came to us excited about generative AI and our immediate decision to invest in the development of a product that would democratize people data insights to empower entire organizations. Within a few months we launched an early adopter program with 80 organizations, and six months later we delivered Vee, a generative AI digital assistant for people analytics, and simultaneously rolled it out to 2.1 million people. As the chief innovation officer, driving that degree of innovation, impacting the market so quickly and fundamentally, that’s momentous.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Binnie explained:
“At Visier, we have two core products, one that can bring instant value to enterprise customers, and one that allows partners and builders to create unique solutions leveraging our platform capabilities.”
“Visier People packages up the most compelling use cases to solve critical business and people challenges for our enterprise customers. Customers are guided along the Visier Path – a unique collection of value aimed to rapidly mature and accelerate our customer’s People Analytics efforts to create real business impact. Built using Visier Alpine, our technology platform, with input from some of the most impactful Fortune 1000 companies for nearly a decade and a half, Visier People has become the undisputed leader in People Analytics – the most comprehensive, fastest to deploy and deliver People Analytics suite in the industry.”
“We have also expanded Visier People with our Visier People Extend which allows our customers to go beyond the best practice use cases we deliver and build their own unique use cases, or to alternatively leverage one of our partners who provide both best practice use cases and advisory and implementation support services.”
“Together these elements of Visier People are able to solve the complete suite of problems and use cases that exist for the HR function, people managers and executive teams specific to their people.”
“Our other core offering is Alpine, the technology platform (PaaS) that powers Visier People. We have been delivering this to our embedded partners to create their own people analytics capabilities and solutions, they can then integrate into their own Software as a Service offerings.”
“Today we have over 55,000 organizations leveraging Alpine, touching over 27 million employees and bringing millions of dollars in impact to those organizations.”
Challenges Faced
What challenges has Binnie and the team faced in building the company? Binnie acknowledged:
“The industry we’re in—which is to take information about employees and work out how to use that to create impact and change—is always facing challenges. The workforce is constantly being impacted whether locally in the individual workplaces, from the culture of their organizations or from societal impacts on the environments those organizations are operating in.”
“For instance, when COVID hit, and everyone had to work from home, some organizations couldn’t do that which made their situation even more complicated. We had to react to that very quickly, our customers were facing issues with absenteeism, turnover and later hybrid work. People analytics was an essential tool in helping leaders understand the impact of remote and hybrid work on their employees.”
“Now, four years later, we are collectively looking at the sudden transformation that is being triggered by generative AI and the impact it will have on productivity. We have been moving quickly, not just to deliver a generative AI product that will help our customers within the HR function, but to think about how we provide insights into how an organization will maximize their use of generative AI to be more effective and successful. People analytics can uncover the consequences generative AI is having on the workforce, will have on the workforce, and how that workforce might lean in and embrace this transformation to deliver better outcomes.”
“Change is a constant in our world today—much of which is affecting the employee base worldwide. We are looking to help organizations become more agile, understand their employees, understand the impact those employees are having on business outcomes, and understand the impact the business is having on employees.”
“That’s why organizations are using Visier, so they have the visibility and knowledge to be agile and move quickly. This is the biggest value we provide – the ability to move quickly, with data backed insights.”
Evolution Of Visier’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Binnie noted:
“Now a 14-year-old company, the technology has changed a lot. We started off, privately hosted, with a flash-based front end. We are now wholly HTML 5 and are hosted in multiple cloud environments to leverage the security and scalability of the mega-platforms.”
“We’ve maintained a commitment to constant innovation since our inception, with a focus on always modernizing our core technology in alignment with how our users experience it. We have delivered new solutions, solved new use cases, and released enhancements every season for over a decade.”
“For example, recently, we’ve delivered an extension to Microsoft Teams, that connects to our AI capabilities to provide people analytics data in a user’s regular flow of work, including on mobile devices.”
“At the same time, we have continued to enhance our platform capabilities, providing rich tooling to make it easy to extend our capabilities and provide integration options for our embedded partners who integrate Alpine into their software products. For example, we have recently provided a new API to our partner so they can synchronize their security management with our own, provision new tenants dynamically and even alter and extend our analytical data model as their own is customized.”
“We recently announced a new initiative – Open for Builders which is a strategic investment in our analytic platform capabilities, community and educational resources that have been designed to help technical and product innovators unleash the power of people data to solve the most pressing business challenges.”
“While we’ve evolved a lot in 14 years, at the same time a lot hasn’t changed. Our core memory engine allows us to respond to questions about people at the speed of thought. It has been enhanced and scaled, made to go even faster as we deal with ever larger organizations wishing to bring ever more insights, history and data. The technology has stayed stable while we’ve continued to evolve with the market, getting to where people are.”
“Most recently we’ve added Vee, our generative AI digital assistant for people analytics. Vee answers workforce specific questions for HR leaders, managers and executives in real-time, helping to democratize people insights to all levels of an organization. It is anchored in our domain-specific data model which is a community dataset built on more than 25 million anonymized employee records, almost 4,000 best practice business metrics, and 250 million benchmarks from over 55,000 customers. It leverages the most complete and robust security architecture in People Analytics to keep data private, secure and accurate. Using Vee, we have collected thousands of variants on the questions people want to be able to ask, and the answers they expect and have seen massive improvements in how accurately Vee answers those questions correctly on the first try.”
“Our technology will always evolve, just like the problems we’re trying to solve are also evolving, but we will always remain true to our core purpose – helping organizations understand the impact their people are having on their business and how their business affects their people.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Binnie cited:
“Again, more than I could even begin to mention – everything from the first customer to spend more than a million dollars with us, to when we hit a million employees in our system (we are now at 27 million), to the first time we rolled out our first benchmarking data from our community data – which was so differentiating in the market. I also think about the first time we had a customer with more than 100K employees which signaled our ability to scale to significant numbers of employees. And now most recently, the day we launched Vee, and two days later announced the deployment of Vee to 2.1 million employees via an embedded partner.”
“I also think it’s important to look at these moments from the outside in, and for me, seeing the Sapient Insights research where we were presented on a graph of people analytics solutions showing customer satisfaction and impact – not only was Visier in the top right of that chart, significantly ahead of our competition, it was gratifying to see our embedded partner, Paycor, be the next player in that space showcasing their success on Alpine. It was impactful to be recognized in both the first and second positions in our category by such a significant margin.”
Customer Success Stories
After asking Binnie about customer success stories, he highlighted:
“Our website is flush with customer stories around the measurable impact they’ve seen using Visier, whether that be on recruiting and retention efforts, or cost savings to their organization. Those are great. But I also like to tell the stories we hear directly from our customers, those that can’t necessarily be told as publicly as they’re more protective of their success. There’s one customer in particular, without mentioning their name, that was looking to expand and redefine their sales organization, and saw Visier as a vehicle for them to optimize their new hire onboarding process, identify high performers, ensure a good employee experience, and improve the time to revenue production. They used Visier for that process and now three years later are reporting success. Visier has become a key tool they use to build their salesforce and have now expanded their use of our product to create management paths within their sales organization, as those people who were initiated into the program are now looking at moving up. This use case has always resonated with me as integral to what we do—leveraging data to drive the most desirable business outcome.”
“Another customer story that I find remarkable is a very large, international organization operating in a complicated geographical structure with hundreds of thousands of employees across several countries. They have used Visier to roll out people insights to every single manager in their organization. They may see as many as four thousand people log in and follow along with the training to understand how to use people insights to create better teams and improve engagement with individual employees. Seeing that scale of deployment to every manager in the organization, worldwide, done successfully and with impact, gets us very excited. It really comes down to helping people make companies better.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Binnie affirmed:
“It really is the breadth of what we can do, the pace we can do it at, and the fact we’re using a shared blueprint that has been accumulated over 14 years, through over 50 thousand organizations, to be truly best practice. We have the complete experience, from supporting generative AI to rich analytics, and now the ability for our customers to build on our platform. We’re very open, Visier is designed to fold into our customers’ landscapes.”
“And, we know what we’re doing—time to value for any organization is critical. Visier is comprehensive, open and provides a short time to value.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future company goals? Binnie pointed out:
“We’ve always stayed true to our goals and purpose that we set when we started the company. We are committed to helping organizations understand their people—the impact people have on business outcomes, and what that means for employees. We will continue to stay true to that purpose because we think it’s very important. We will continue to invest in increasing productivity because that will be the core driver for the next 20 years of the software industry. Employees are really the linchpin to create sustainable growth and productivity. Looking at generative AI and how it’s transforming the workforce, it’s largely around productivity gains. We live in a world where talent supply keeps shrinking, and it’s upon every organization to maximize the impact of their people, and that’s where Visier comes in, it’s core to our purpose. We’ll continue to dig into better understanding the information we have about people, establish an intimate understanding of their motivators, what drives them, and connect that more to what they do and the work that needs to be done. That’s how we create impact on the industry as a whole.”
