In an era where artificial intelligence writes emails, tracks productivity, and analyzes employee sentiment, the human side of work has never felt more fragile or more valuable. That tension defines a new generation of technology companies like Zensai, which is betting that empathy, clarity, and culture will become the next great frontier of enterprise performance.
Robin Daniels, the company's Chief Business Officer, calls it human success. "Our whole story is that HR is dead," he said. "The old school HR playbook, HR tech, is kind of dead. Everyone hates it, nobody likes using it, and if it really worked, you would see people be super motivated and happy in their jobs. Yet that's not the case here in 2025."
Zensai, founded in Denmark and built entirely inside Microsoft 365 and Teams, unifies learning, engagement, and performance into a single experience. Its proposition is simple: make professional growth as seamless as sending a message on Teams. But beneath the product lies a philosophical stance that replaces HR as administration with HR as engineering for human potential.
The timing could hardly be better. The global HR technology market, worth around $36 billion in 2024, is expected to double within a decade. Meanwhile, Gallup reports that only one in five employees worldwide feels engaged at work. Daniels believes the solution is not more surveillance or dashboards but systems that blend accountability with meaning. "Human success is not just the platform," he said. "It's the philosophy, the culture, the leadership. At some point you also need the right tools to make this happen, and that's where Zensai comes in."
A Career Built on Culture
Daniels's career tracks two decades of Silicon Valley's evolution. "I've been a nerd my whole life," he recalled. "When I was 21, I bought a one-way ticket from Copenhagen to California. I didn't have a job or a place to stay. I just knew I wanted to make it in tech."
After early setbacks during the dot-com crash, he joined Salesforce in 2007. "It was the first time in my career where I felt like I was working with the Navy SEALs of the industry," he said. "These people were so good at what they did that it just took everything to another level."
He later led teams at Box and LinkedIn before stepping into the storm as CMO of WeWork. "It all came crashing down," he said. "Which is a little painful of course in your career, especially if you're the CMO being out in front of that."
Those experiences shaped his conviction that culture and clarity, not perks, drive performance. "If you want to do great work, you need clarity around your goals," he said. "In the absence of that, it creates toxic workplaces and political infighting."
From Learning to Leadership
Zensai organizes its software around three modules: Learn365, Engage365, and Perform365. Each addresses one of Daniels's recurring questions about how people grow, connect, and stay accountable. Together they form what he calls the Human Success Platform.
"The human part is how you show up and figure out how to motivate yourself and be a good person for the team," he explained. "The success part is whether you're reaching the goals you've set."
He sees this balance as missing in most corporate systems. "If people are just super happy every day but the company's suffering, that's not success," he said. "But if your company's crushing it and everyone's miserable, is that success either?"
For Daniels, empathy and performance are not opposites but interdependent forces. "I want everybody to do well and make money and all that stuff," he said, "but not at the expense of other people or the world or their happiness."
The Broader Shift
Across the industry, HR technology is in flux. Giants like Workday and SAP built platforms for compliance, not connection. As AI automates routine work, the only edge left is human. "AI will disrupt everything to do with hard skills but not with soft skills," Daniels said. "As a leader, you have to lean into what AI can't replace, curiosity, personal growth, understanding human emotions, psychology."
That belief is gaining traction. Studies show that companies investing in engagement and learning outperform peers in productivity and profitability. Yet barely a third of managers say they feel equipped to build high-trust teams. Zensai's bet is that a system embedded in daily workflows, guiding learning paths, tracking goals, and surfacing feedback, can close that gap without feeling like another layer of software.
Leading with Accountability
Daniels's leadership philosophy centers on accountability as a human skill. "Input is the way you show up every day, the way you treat your team members, the way you collaborate," he said. "You can control that as a human being 100 percent."
He argues that managers must hold people accountable not just for results but for behavior. "If there's no clarity on what you're trying to achieve, it just leads to a lot of finger-pointing and blame," he said. "Clarity of goals and clarity of behaviors, those are the foundations."
It is a model that rejects both the cold metrics of automation and the vagueness of performative empathy. Daniels's version of human success merges the two. "Maybe it's because I grew up with hippy parents," he said with a laugh. "I'd like the world to be one where the person is successful and joyful and happy and they're doing something meaningful, but they're also seeing the benefits from it."
The Long Game
Zensai has found traction with clients such as Maersk, Pepsi, and Flight Centre, but the company's ambition extends beyond market share. It wants to redefine how organizations measure value. Daniels sees that mission in personal terms. "I want to be known as somebody who creates leaders and gets leaders to rise up," he said. "Give them purpose and joy and a little bit of fire in their belly to go chase things that matter."
As AI continues to automate the measurable, the immeasurable, the spark between people, may become the real competitive advantage. If Zensai can turn that principle into practice, its concept of human success might do more than reinvent HR. It might remind business itself what it means to be human.
