Collibra CEO Felix Van de Maele said it becomes “a red flag” if job seekers wanting to join his data governance platform cannot show familiarity with AI.
“In any interview, you expect people to think AI first in all the ways they do their job,” Van de Maele said in an interview with Business Insider. “And so if we ask for that and people haven’t used or experimented with AI tools, they don’t have a sense of how they do their job better, faster using AI, that definitely becomes a bit of a red flag.”
Founded in 2008 in Belgium, Collibra is among the top names in the data governance sector. In 2021, the private company was valued at $5.2 billion. Collibra has worked with McDonald’s, Credit Suisse, Adobe, and Heineken.
Van de Maele said the precise AI skills he’s looking for vary by position. For example, he said, if he’s interviewing an engineer, he wants to know if they are using AI agents like Cursor.
“I think you can ask questions to get a sense of how are people actually using those tools and what kind of experience have they had,” he said. “I think that’s really important. Do they have an interest and are they leaning into wanting to use those tools, or are they more defensive and taking a step back on the adoption of those tools?”
Van de Maele said that at Collibra, which he described as sort of like “ServiceNow for data,” AI adoption has increased drastically over the past year. His roughly 1,000 employees around the world use AI for everything from transcribing meetings to building custom agents and assistants. The goal is to push AI usage to change how work is done.
Staying ahead in enterprise AI
In the enterprise marketplace, Van de Maele said he sees the ideal niche for his company as an independent layer that can connect a large amount of company-specific data, unlocking the true capabilities of AI, particularly the promise of AI agents.
“Imagine you’re hiring a senior new person and in your organization and ask them to do certain analysis,” he said.
It’s challenging for humans to navigate all the hoops required to access what they need and understand how companies organize their data. In an agentic AI future, an agent could find themselves stuck in a similar situation.
“If a human can’t do it, the agent can’t do it unless you make that context formal and you capture that context so the agent can use that,” Van de Maele said.
Making sure customers get a tailored experience is why Palantir helped popularize the use of forward-deployed engineers. OpenAI and other model makers are following suit with their own teams. The current issue with enterprise AI, Van de Maele said, is that if a company is tied to just a single model they could easily fall behind.
“If I’m a big bank, if I’m a big organization, I don’t want to be completely tied to one model vendor because who knows, maybe next month there’s another model that’s five times better or five times cheaper,” he said. “I want to have the flexibility to change. That’s strategically important to me.”
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