How Pebl turned historic data into an AI goldmine

US-based HR specialist Pebl has found a smart way to turn its old work data into a modern asset for its employees and customers alike.

“We pivoted to tech in a big way,” says Charlotte Johnson, the company’s regional vice president for EMEA. She explained the strategy to me at their London offices in Soho.

If you haven’t come across them before, Pebl is an Employer of Record (EOR) and workplace management platform. It operates in over 185 countries around the world, helping companies scale globally at speed.

It takes around 18 months to set up a legal entity to employ someone abroad. So EORs allow companies to get up and running straight away, handling issues like payroll, compliance and employment law. It’s how many companies, especially in the tech space, have managed to scale globally at lightning speed.

If a company wants, for example, to employ a batch of software engineers abroad, it can arrange that and also work with Pebl’s recruitment partners to find the staff.

The model is particularly well suited to an age of remote working.

Pebl has been running for close to 12 years, originally under the name Velocity Global. It operated with a “professional services mindset”, explains Johnson, advising firms on tactical hiring decisions. So if businesses wanted to hire abroad, it would advise them on how to handle tricky issues that vary from country to country.

“You can imagine all the laws, compliances and benefits,” she says. This might include salary benchmarking figures or, as Johnson says, “how many payment months are there in Portugal?”

They realised there was a rich dataset, sitting in their archive from this era of the company, detailing all these country rules and regulations, including data such as correspondence, meeting notes and memoranda.

“All of that information that we've gained over that decade, we’ve put into our AI-first platform. So we have this decade of knowledge, using AI to allow you to ask questions.”

This knowledge base can be easily interrogated by AI, for the benefit of colleagues internally, but also as a new kind of powerful resource for clients.

The process involves segmenting the data because internally they may want to access things like specific salary data for a case, but clients just need to do general research about different countries’ rules and practices.

The system has been built by Pebl’s own internal tech team.

So here’s the business lesson: Think of your company’s historic data not just in terms of due diligence, but as a potential resource for making fresh products that can benefit both your own employees and clients. This data may contain your unique selling point…