Why Visier Was Made for AI

When Visier announced general availability of Vee in April 2024, following a successful preview program with over 80 customers, the excitement surrounding our generative AI digital assistant was palpable. 

Indeed, Vee was an industry first, enabling non-technical business leaders to ask questions of their workforce data using spontaneous language queries. Today, we have over two million Vee users, a scale that may be unprecedented for generative AI in HR. But what some people might not realize is that this novel development was actually 14 years in the making. We’d like to say that we saw generative AI coming during those earliest days, but sometimes being lucky is good enough.

Visier’s platform: where the magic happens

Visier was founded in 2010 to transform the way organizations make decisions about their people. At the time, organizations were using legacy tools like Crystal Reports or Tableau to build custom reports in cumbersome ways. Our mission was to turn this situation on its head, and we ultimately developed an end-to-end analytics platform that simplifies access to people data.

It’s this platform that provides the structural foundation for Vee. As Josh Bersin, CEO and Founder of Josh Bersin Co. explains, “It isn't just the generative AI that's unique here. It's the layers underneath it that are pulling the data from all of these different systems to put it together into a meaningful format.” 

“What Visier did many years ago was, they said, ‘look, this particular domain is uniquely complex in many ways, the definitions of what all these different data analysts mean vary across different companies,’' he says. “Now, let's build a layer of essentially integration software that brings that together into a multidimensional data store. Let's build a tool on top of it that's really, really easy to use and analyze data. And what Vee does is it sits on top of that and adds a generative layer.” 

A questions-first approach

Our goal has always been to adopt a questions-first approach to people analytics. We baked domain best practices right into the platform, eliminating the tedious technical work necessary to access common HR metrics like time to fill so that leaders could get the answers they needed quickly. 

Until recently, the most intuitive way to provide non-analysts with access to the insights was via pre-built analyses that served up specific insights and charts. But Vee has been a real game-changer on this front.

Generative AI is good at understanding and interpreting questions, providing clear and comprehensible answers and specific guidance for end users. Its capacity to handle a sequence of related questions allows users to ask follow-up questions in natural, conversational language.

With Vee, anybody with the appropriate permissions can immediately get responses to their most pressing queries: Which high performers have the greatest risk of leaving in the next year? What percentage of my team is women? Which jobs are the hardest to fill? 

Because Vee is so intuitive, HRBPs, CHROs, business leaders, and frontline managers can access the analytics with zero ramp-up time.

[Infographic] How Visier's people data platform keeps sensitive people data safe

All of this wouldn’t be possible without a robust people analytics platform. Vee uses GPT-4.0 Turbo on Azure OpenAI Service to provide a lightning-fast, user-friendly interface, and the actual sourcing of the answer is done securely by the Visier platform, not public LLMs.

Vee translates questions into a query and uses generative AI to come back with an accurate answer based on the organization’s people data within Visier. The number crunching happens behind the scenes.

One platform manages complexity and change

Vee generates meaningful answers because it sits on top of a stack that quickly turns a complex, changing data landscape into dependable people insights. The underlying platform accommodates messy and inconsistent data, and offers flexibility by integrating workforce data with other business information, enabling strategic decision-making. 

Visier is uniquely suited for people data, which is always changing. Unlike financial data, people data follows the workforce through many changes, which requires taking a long, interactive view of objects to map the connections. Visier automatically factors in time as a dimension, allowing users to see progression over time.

“That's a difficult thing to build on your own. And our customers even report that they can support all of this with just one operational headcount to keep all these things going. That's the power of Visier, and that's the power that we bring to generative AI,” says Ike Bennion, vice president of Platform and Platform Marketing at Visier.

Reliable and secure insights

When developing Vee, Visier considered both the strengths and limitations of LLMs. Vee leverages the capabilities of LLMs while upholding Visier's dedication to privacy and security.

Data security is handled just the same as if someone were using Visier’s interface.  

The underlying security model is designed to handle sensitive people data with enterprise-grade security, privacy, and user access. 

Visier’s security posture is trusted by the most heavily regulated industries. Leveraging encryption, tenant data segregation, and robust infrastructure security, Visier employs a secure software development lifecycle and performs regular penetration testing to ensure resilience against emerging threats.

This means that Vee is not only fast, it’s reliable—something that is crucial for leaders who need the best insights to create an impact with their people.

In today’s rapidly evolving business environment, it’s not enough to measure success, people leaders need to generate results. Generative AI can significantly enhance HR by transforming strategic decision-making through instant answers. 

At Visier, simplifying people analytics has always been our mission—and with generative AI, it’s now that much easier.