Building AI-Native HR | Maki People & Tudor Havriliuc on the Future of Work
Building AI-Native HR | Maki People & Tudor Havriliuc on the Future of Work
Watch the full recording here
Recorded on May 15 2025, 5:00 – 5:45 pm CEST
TL;DR
AI is hitting an inflection point in HR. Tudor Havriliuc, who scaled People teams from hundreds to tens-of-thousands at Meta and Salesforce, argues that the next three years will deliver more change than the last three decades.
Data that used to evaporate will finally compound. Interviews, 1-on-1s and day-to-day work generate oceans of unstructured insight. LLMs turn those lost conversations into a living talent graph that powers better hiring, retention and workforce planning.
ROI has never been clearer. AI-native tools let HR leaders frame business cases in terms any CFO loves: faster time-to-hire, lower attrition, and millions in productivity unlocked.
From SaaS sprawl to intelligent agents. Instead of stitching together rigid systems, tomorrow’s HR stack will be an orchestration of agents that learn from context and surface answers on demand—no “implementation” required.
Move now or fall behind. Early adopters are already training proprietary data flywheels; laggards will wake up to competitors with years of compounding learning, radically
The Interview
Introducing Tudor Havriliuc: Scaling People at Hyper-growth
Tudor opened with a quick tour of his 20-year career: from Towers Perrin consultancy to VP of HR at Meta (joining at 700 employees, leaving after 70 000) and, before that, a similar rocket-ride at Salesforce. Today he advises and invests in “AI-first work-tech” companies—Maki People among them—and sees the same patterns repeating at a new velocity.
Why HR Is at an AI Inflection Point
ChatGPT’s leap from zero to 100 million users in a month signalled a platform shift. HR sits in the blast radius because it touches every stage of the employee lifecycle and owns a data set richer than any other G&A function. As Tudor put it, “people are the largest line-item on the P&L—improving their ROI moves the whole business.”
From Data Wastelands to Decision Engines
Max highlighted a painful truth: ≈90 % of talent data—interview conversations, sales calls, onboarding feedback—disappears the moment it’s created. LLM-powered systems flip that script, capturing and structuring the signal so every future decision is informed by the last thousand. Imagine a recruiter who walks into an interview with perfect recall of the company’s prior million interviews.
ROI That Sells Itself to the CFO
Tudor has bought HR tech for years; the hardest part was the CFO deck. With AI-native tools the math is simple: 70 % of a recruiter’s day on admin → automated; time-to-hire cut from 40 days to 10; attrition down seven points. Max shared live Maki customers where those HR metrics translated directly into the CEO/CFO dashboard.
Goodbye SaaS, Hello Agentic Platforms
Both speakers echoed Satya Nadella’s “SaaS is dead” provocation. Traditional suites require armies of consultants; AI agents plug into existing systems, learn by doing, and surface dashboards or forecasts on demand—“no implementation” in the classic sense. The next decade will swap bulky software for conversational copilots that treat HR as a profit centre.
Workforce Planning Re-imagined
Audience questions turned to workforce planning. Today it’s often static head-count spreadsheets; tomorrow it’s a living skills marketplace. AI can map every employee’s capabilities, every project’s requirements, and model demand/supply scenarios in real time—turning HR-Finance alignment from an annual fire-drill into a continuous, data-driven loop.
Advice for HR Leaders: Act Now
Tudor’s closing warning: in three years, companies that started training AI on their unique talent data will have a compounding advantage. Those that “wait and see” will face competitors operating at radically lower cost with far richer people insights.
Final Thoughts
The conversation ended on optimism (and a welcome to Paris for Tudor). AI is racing ahead; HR leaders who embrace the shift will make their organisations both more productive and more human.
Interested in putting these ideas to work? Let’s have a chat!
