Collibra CEO Felix Van de Maele said it would be a “red flag” if job seekers looking to join the company's data governance platform could not demonstrate they were familiar with AI.
“In any interview, people expect to put AI first in every way they do their job,” Van de Meere told Business Insider in an interview. “So if we demand it and people haven't used or tried AI tools, they don't understand how to use AI to do their jobs better and faster. That's definitely a red flag.”
Founded in Belgium in 2008, Collibra is a leader in data governance. In 2021, this private company was valued at $5.2 billion. Collibra has worked with McDonald's, Credit Suisse, Adobe, and Heineken.
Van de Meere said the exact AI skills sought will vary depending on the position. For example, he said, if he's interviewing an engineer, he wants to know if they're using an AI agent like Cursor.
“I think you can ask questions to find out how people actually use those tools and what their experiences are,” he said. “I think that's really important: Are they interested and want to use those tools, or are they becoming more defensive and taking a step back in adopting those tools?”
Van de Maele said Collibra is like “ServiceNow for data” and said AI adoption has increased significantly over the past year. Our approximately 1,000 employees around the world use AI for everything from transcribing meetings to building custom agents and assistants. The goal is to drive the use of AI to change the way work is done.
Stay ahead with enterprise AI
In the enterprise market, Van de Maele said he believes the ideal niche for his company is an independent layer that can connect large amounts of company-specific data and unlock the true power of AI, especially the potential of AI agents.
“Imagine hiring a senior entry-level employee within your organization and asking them to perform a specific analysis,” he said.
It's hard for humans to jump through all the hoops needed to access what they need and understand how companies organize their data. In the future of agent AI, agents may find themselves in similar situations.
“If humans can't do it, agents can't do it unless you formalize that context and capture that context so agents can use it,” Van de Meere said.
Ensuring customers get a customized experience is why Palantir has helped popularize the use of forward-deployed engineers. OpenAI and other model makers are following suit with their own teams. Van de Maele said the current problem with enterprise AI is that if companies are tied to just one model, they can easily fall behind.
“If I'm a big bank or a big organization, I don't want to be completely locked into one model vendor because next month there might be another model that's maybe five times better or five times cheaper,” he said. “I want to have the flexibility to change. That's strategically important to me.”
