The Maki Manifesto, the era of compound intelligence
I. Work is the biggest system we still run blind
Work shapes everything: economies, societies, identities, happiness. Yet the way organizations make talent decisions is still painfully archaic. For decades, HR systems were built for record-keeping, not intelligence. Processes became manual. Decisions became inconsistent. And the most valuable signal in the enterprise, human potential, remained invisible.
We run talent blind because we don’t measure what matters. We built systems around résumés, titles, and history, not around skills, the only real unit of capability. Most of what matters is unstructured: conversations, judgments, behaviors, context, outcomes. It is lost, fragmented, or never captured. Organizations invest billions in strategy and technology, while still relying on intuition and incomplete data to decide who gets hired, who grows, who leads.
This is not a tooling problem. It is one of the biggest challenges of the century.
II. From systems of record to systems of intelligence
AI is not a new interface. It is a new execution layer. For decades, HR technology has been passive: storing shallow information, mostly CVs, job history, and fragmented notes. A system of record.
AI agents change that. They turn HR into an active system of intelligence, transforming raw hiring data into structured skill signal and insights that actually drive better decisions. They don’t just manage workflows. They execute them. And the outcomes are real: faster hiring, more consistent decisions, higher quality hires, and measurable business impact. And because agents interact through conversation, they capture what legacy systems never could: signal, depth, and understanding.
This is what Maki is building. Maki is the intelligence engine that powers scientific hiring at scale.
We bring it to life through autonomous agents like Mochi and Tomo. Mochi engages, interviews, and assesses candidates through conversation. Tomo helps hiring managers turn evaluation into clarity, alignment, and better decisions. This is the shift: from tools that support teams to intelligence that scales them.
III. Talent becomes a continuous system
Hiring, development, mobility, growth. These were never separate worlds. They were always one loop. But until now, organizations lacked the infrastructure to connect them.
Today, the same intelligence that can evaluate a candidate can also understand an employee. It can map skills, reveal potential, identify gaps, and open paths. The shared language is skills.
Skills connect potential to performance.
They create continuity across roles, teams, and careers. This is what replaces fragmented HR: a unified system of human understanding.
IV. Compound intelligence becomes the new moat
Automation makes work faster. Compound intelligence makes it accumulate.
In a compound system, every conversation produces structured signal. Every decision produces measurable data. Every outcome becomes feedback. And every cycle makes the system more precise.
Over time, intelligence stops being a feature. It becomes an asset: a self-reinforcing model of what predicts success, performance, growth, and retention, built from real human journeys inside the organization.
In the next decade, the most valuable HR systems won’t be the ones with the best workflows. They’ll be the ones that continuously learn what predicts success, and make that intelligence usable across the organization.
V. The tipping point: this has already started
This is not theory. Some of the largest organizations in the world, across radically different industries, are already living this shift. They are seeing a category of ROI that HR has rarely achieved: structural transformation, not incremental improvement.
Recruiter productivity improves dramatically. Hiring decisions become more consistent and measurable. Candidate experience becomes scalable, without sacrificing depth.
And this is where the world splits.
Organizations that adopt compound intelligence will evolve faster than their competitors. Those that don’t will be dépassé, not because they chose the wrong tool, but because they stayed stuck in linear processes while others moved to systems that learn.
In the next decade, the difference won’t be headcount. It will be the speed at which intelligence compounds.
VI. Trust is the condition for scale
This transformation only matters if it is safe. Talent is not a dataset. It is people’s lives. So AI cannot be adopted like any other enterprise technology.
The future belongs to systems that are built for trust from day one: auditable, governed, transparent, privacy-first, and designed to reduce bias rather than amplify it.
At Maki, we believe the most powerful intelligence in HR must also be the most trusted. Because without safety, there is no adoption. And without adoption, there is no future.
VII. The human future
Maki is building the intelligence layer for human potential. Not to replace humans, but to amplify them. To remove noise and repetition, so recruiters, managers, and leaders can focus on judgment, alignment, and high-stakes decisions.
For organizations, this means hiring becomes scientific at scale: measurable, consistent, continuously improving. For individuals, it means a fairer and clearer process: better signals, better matching, less randomness, more opportunity.
Because the future of work is not just intelligence. It is what humans can become when intelligence compounds with them.