July 21, 2025
People Directors today are in the same position Marketing Directors were in the 1990s.
Back in the 90s, Marketing Directors “knew they were wasting half their ad budget… the problem was they didn’t know which half”.
Then Google ads came along and suddenly there was a way to evidence the causal relationship between an ad and a sale.
And what happened?
📈 Between 2000 and 2025, the global digital advertising market has grown from $0 to $65bn and it now accounts for over 60% of all advertising spending.
Why? Because businesses want to invest in tactics that give them a predictable, positive return.
The challenge for People Directors is they just can’t talk in the same language as the rest of the business. When they sit around the Exec table, Marketing Directors can pitch for investment on the basis of a predicted ROI… “give me £x for an advertising campaign and I’ll give you £y in additional sales”.
When the People Director wants to make the case for investing in training… what can they say?! Not much more than “it’s really important, we have to do it”. (Basically the same case the Marketing Director was making for their ad budget in 1995!).
Why is this?
Well at the moment, People teams have no way of evidencing the causal relationship between people management tactics or investments and business outcomes.
So instead of investing in the initiatives that will create the most value, they just have to use their best judgment and experience to manage their budget on cost… “I’ll put £50k into training for managers, £25k into mental health support and £10k into a new reward scheme, and hold £15k to cover any ER issues”.
Just reflect on your own business for a moment…
Are you able to quantify the ROI of the training you give your people? When does training have a positive financial impact on the business? And when is it a cost to the business?
If you hire a new employee, how long do they have to stay before their contribution to the business offsets the cost of hire?
Do you know how your shift patterns impact employee behaviour and business performance? If you don’t give people two days off in a row, what’s the impact on your employee turnover? To what extent does team cohesion have an impact on your sales?
Well at Youda, we’re on a path to being able to answer all these questions because we’re using the data from our AI agents to train a machine learning model for causal inference.
When our causal inference model is sufficiently robust, your People team will be able to predict behaviour (e.g. flight risk “There’s an 85% likelihood that Jenny will hand in her notice in September); ask counterfactuals (“Hey Youda, could you tell me what would have happened to our employee turnover last year if we’d switched to a four day working week?”); and identify the ROI of specific interventions (“Hey Youda, can you tell me what impact our customer service training has on sales?”).
These are the sorts of insights you need if you want to create a culture that gives you a competitive advantage. Your People team can start being proactive, rather than reactive. They can start managing their budget on value generated, rather than cost. And they can start to get really smart and precise about the tactics and investments that make your people happier, your customers happier, and which improve the financial performance of your business.
If you’d like to find out how Youda can help you start predicting behaviour and forecasting business outcomes, please book a demo call here.
Let’s have a chat.
