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Dr. Ken Matos
Dr. Ken Matos is Director of the Insights Lab at HiBob, where he leads research on global trends in employee experience and HR best practices. He holds a Ph.D. in Industrial and Organizational Psychology from The George Washington University, a master's in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University, and completed his undergraduate work in psychology at Amherst College.
Why HR and Finance Feel Like Cats and Dogs, and How to Fix It
Before HiBob, Ken led a global consulting team advising organizations on how to collect, interpret, and act on HR data, including roles as Director of People Science at Culture Amp and Senior Director of Employment Research and Practice at the Families and Work Institute, where he co-directed the When Work Works project with SHRM. His published research spans inclusion, employee wellbeing, leadership, and organizational culture. More recently, he's argued that HR and Finance often talk past each other not because their goals differ, but because they use two different metric languages for the same underlying reality: HR should learn to frame every proposal around one of finance's three "greatest hits" (saving money, making money, or mitigating risk), with risk mitigation being the most underused and most persuasive of the three. At HiBob, he has also helped build the company's AI Skills Framework, a practical model covering AI readiness, individual AI usage, and organizational AI usage, spanning literacy, prompting, output evaluation, workflow redesign, automation, and governance.
Topics Ken speaks on
- Why HR and Finance talk past each other, and how to align them
- Building an HR business case Finance will actually approve
- Building a practical AI skills framework for HR
- Employee experience and workplace culture research
- People analytics and how organizations use HR data
Sessions with Achieve
Ken is a featured panelist on the Achieve webcast "Beyond 'It's Complicated': HR & Finance Alignment for the AI Era" (April 22, 2026), a Transform Spotlight Session presented in partnership with HiBob alongside colleague Brian Martell and Liana Rodriguez of Viz.ai. In it, Ken makes the case that HR and Finance are less like cats and dogs and more like two sides of the same coin, and walks through the "so what" technique for pressure-testing a business case until it clearly ties back to money, cost, or risk.
Connect
Want more on what the research actually says about building real AI readiness in HR? Learn more about the Achieve Leadership Network.