About HiBob
HiBob is an Israeli unicorn, now celebrating about a decade since it was founded, that develops a platform for HR (Human Resources) management. The product offers an End-to-End solution for every stage an employee goes through in an organization, using Cutting Edge technologies to define and build the future of HR.
Today the company has more than 1,300 employees worldwide, with headquarters in Tel Aviv and additional offices abroad. It has a strong culture of innovation, including dedicated groups (like the AI Mind team) that drive business development and internal AI strategies supporting the development and product teams.
Why does HiBob need AI Champions?
The initiative was born out of a gap between the financial investment and actual usage. The company had bought expensive licenses for tools like Copilot, then found that adoption stood at only 30% to 40%. Many employees were skeptical about the quality of AI output, or worried the tools were meant to replace them.
The Champions guilds were set up to bridge that gap and turn AI from "just another tool" into part of the organizational culture:
- The opportunity: the champions act as ambassadors who show teams how AI doesn't replace them but lets them focus on more meaningful work and improve their Velocity.
- Sharing knowledge and preventing duplication: the guild structure makes it possible to spot one-off solutions (like agents or automations a single employee built) and spread them across the whole organization. That prevents several people from building the same solution in parallel, and creates standardization of work tools.
- Improving business metrics: the end goal isn't just using the tools. It's shorter development times, shorter PR and Review times, and higher-quality output.
In the end, the champions are the link between leadership's vision (Top-Down) and the work and innovation happening on the ground (Bottom-Up), and they're the ones who make sure the organization "rows in the same boat."
How were the guilds set up?
It didn't start with management presentations. It started in the kitchenette. To understand the real barriers, Lihi stood by the coffee machine and ran a qualitative "field survey." She gathered feedback from employees to understand why they weren't using the existing tools (answers like "the answers are bad," "I know better," or general skepticism). From there, the setup process was built in a few key stages:
- Finding the true enthusiasts: Lihi identified the employees who were already "Savvy," the ones talking about AI in the hallways and using ChatGPT on their own initiative. She turned them into a "Core Guild," a group of leaders including representatives from engineering, product, and design, who worked closely with her on building the strategy.
- A dedicated split: understanding that development needs are different from design needs, the activity was split into 3 separate guilds: Engineering, Product, and Design. Each guild got a dedicated leader, KPIs specific to its field, and a tailored weekly agenda.
- Recruitment and support (Top-Down & Bottom-Up): people were recruited to the guilds through manager recommendations (Top-Down), which gave the move organizational backing. At the launch sessions, which included refreshments, they put things on the table: they talked about the fear of being replaced by AI and presented the alternative, the opportunity to become technology leaders.
- Creating a routine and infrastructure: to keep the pulse high, they set fixed weekly meetings, opened dedicated Slack channels for each guild (plus a general channel called "AI in the house"), and set up a central Notion page to document the knowledge and the sessions.
How are the guilds structured?
To keep the pulse high and the activity continuous, the guilds run on 3 main pillars:
- A weekly routine (The Pulse): every guild has a fixed weekly meeting (recorded for anyone who can't make it). The leader sends the agenda 2 days in advance, but the content is mostly "Bottom-Up": guild members present agents they've built, share Best Practices (insights on working with Cursor, for example), and solve problems together live. The meetings also include lighter segments to keep people engaged.
- Knowledge management and communication: the activity is centralized in a company Notion that holds the champion lists, meeting links, and recordings. Day-to-day communication runs through dedicated Slack channels for each guild and a shared general channel. In that channel, Lihi started out running a weekly "AI Digest" with news from around the world, which over time became an interactive channel where employees themselves share new tools and updates they've found.
- Governance and sync: to avoid "throwing away resources" and having different departments build the same solutions twice, they created a central board for managing the agents and other builds. The process is accompanied by the "AI Mind" team and information security, who make sure the builds meet the company's standards and are approved for Security and Compliance before they're rolled out.
What successes did the guilds achieve?
The biggest success of the move is that AI went from "just another tool" pushed by management to an organizational culture employees are proud of. The change showed up in a few key areas:
- Full adoption and branding: within a few months (from February to June/July), the company went from 30% to 40% usage to 100% adoption of the AI tools. Beyond the numbers, you could see the success when employees started describing themselves as "AI Champions" on LinkedIn and in the hallways, as a status symbol and a professional brand. That created buzz, and more employees wanted to join.
- A dramatic improvement in Velocity: the metrics showed a significant gain in efficiency. PR (Pull Request) times dropped from days to just a day and a half, Review times got shorter, and QA processes shrank dramatically.
- Technological innovation (Build with AI): the guilds made advanced technical solutions possible, like an MCP connection between Figma and Cursor that significantly shortened Frontend development. Employees also started building agents on their own that solved problems the company didn't even know it had.
- Preventing duplication (Governance): the organized work with a central board and the "AI Mind" team prevented wasted resources. For example, the system caught that 3 employees from different departments (marketing, product, and CS) wanted to build the exact same agent, and connecting them saved double and triple work.
What challenges did you face?
The road to 100% adoption wasn't smooth, and Lihi describes several barriers and complications that came up along the way:
- Skepticism and fear: early on, the "kitchenette survey" revealed all kinds of resistance, from complaints about output quality ("the answers are bad," "I know better") to an existential fear that AI would replace employees.
- Wasted resources and duplication: without a guiding hand, "islands" of duplicate work formed. In one case it turned out that 3 employees from different departments (marketing, product, and CS) were trying to build the exact same agent in parallel. The challenge was to create a Governance mechanism and a central board to prevent that waste.
- The trust barrier on "big tasks": even after the tools were in wide use, employees tended to use AI for small tasks and get them out of the way quickly, but hesitated to rely on it for complex, large core tasks. It took work from the team leads and presenting Data to build that confidence.
- The hype fading (the "defibrillator" stage): as in any community, the initial excitement was followed by a natural lull. Lihi describes the need to use a "defibrillator": reinvent the activity, refresh the KPIs, and turn the champions from "ambassadors" into Creators and Builders, to keep things relevant and energized.
- Joining on the move (Onboarding): because the motto was that everyone "rows the boat" together at a fast pace, no structured onboarding process was built for new guild members, which made it hard for them to close the gap with the knowledge the group had already built up.
Tips for success
Lihi's main tip is: "It's all about the people." To get an initiative like this off the ground, she recommends not compromising and recruiting the true enthusiasts, the ones who wake up in the morning with a light in their eyes and a real passion for technology.
Lihi stresses that a move like this takes high energy (and even a little "madness") from the leading team. So it's important to find partners who'll go All-in with you, people who are willing to invest beyond the routine and who live the topic, because in the end, it's the passion of the Core Guild that drives the whole community forward.