For the CHRO
During a transformation engagement, a Fortune 100 client asked us what we knew about their Workday instance for a $15-25M Workday project they had. We produced a business case in an hour. From the same knowledge store, we produced two more. They told us the consulting equivalent would have cost $100,000 each.
Here is how that works.
Led by former Heads of People Analytics and HR technology leaders from Amazon, JPMorgan Chase, Google, Meta, Nike, and Expedia.
The situation
The 2030 mandate from your board and CEO is a credible, funded plan that compounds across every budget cycle between now and then — not a vision deck. 14 quarters sounds long enough to plan and short enough to miss. Most CHROs will lose the first two of them to discovery: mapping what the function actually does, where the friction is, what AI can plausibly absorb.
The big consultancies will quote you eight figures and eighteen months to do that discovery and hand back an off-the-shelf recommendation. Your team could do it internally on top of their day jobs. Neither path lands you in front of the board this year.
Ikona runs that discovery in 90 days. You walk into your next board meeting with the current-state map, the business cases, and the roadmap — generated from evidence inside your own organization. Your team has ongoing access to the knowledge store after we leave, and it compounds every quarter between now and 2030.
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What you walk away with
You have the business cases, process maps, and roadmaps your CFO and board are asking for, generated from your own organization rather than a consultant’s template. You can answer the follow-up questions because the evidence is yours.
The knowledge store stays live for you. Dozens of stakeholder interviews, captured, cleaned, and structured into 1,700+ queryable pages of evidence. A new question produces a new answer from the same evidence, at near-zero marginal cost. The investment compounds every one of the 13 quarters after discovery wraps.
The $15-25M Workday case in the hero was generated in an hour from the knowledge store. So were the other two. Every future question against that store becomes another business case, another roadmap, another board deck.
Why this is possible
The reason a traditional consulting team takes a quarter to produce a business case is that they are starting with fresh consultants each time. They send junior generalists who learn your domain while they bill you. We bring industry leaders with a methodology and a system that solves your biggest problems.
Our founders ran people analytics at Amazon, JPMorgan, Merck, and Nike. We have built and rebuilt the function the CHRO is now trying to redesign. You are not paying us to learn your domain.
Each interview builds on everything every prior interview has established. Our system decomposes a research question into dozens of structured sub-questions, routed across a library of 5,655+ assessment questions, then sends each one to the person most likely to answer it. By interview thirty, the marginal interview produces more signal than interview one did, not less. Nobody starts from nothing.
Interviews are captured, cleaned, and structured into a queryable store, so the artifacts at the end of the engagement are generated from evidence, not memory or notes. A new question against the same store produces a new answer in an afternoon. That is why one hour can produce $300K of output — the work was done during the capture, and it stays done.
Practitioners, not generalists
Co-founder and CEO
Former head of people analytics at Amazon (1M+ employees), JPMorgan Chase, and Google. 20+ years building enterprise analytics functions at scale.
Co-founder and CTO
Former machine learning product leader at Amazon and Expedia. Leads Ikona’s platform and the knowledge store infrastructure that makes the methodology run at scale.
Co-founder and CPO
Built people analytics at Meta, Uber, Nike, and Argo AI, then served as VP of People Analytics Strategy at One Model. HR Tech 100 honoree.
Beyond the three founders
Three founders run every engagement. Behind them is a marketplace of senior people analytics practitioners we pull in when the question demands specific expertise. Compensation benchmarking. Workforce planning at scale. DEI measurement. Specific HCM platforms. Anyone we add has held the role. No analysts billing at partner rates.
We do not pretend to be experts in everything. We know the people who are: compensation, talent mobility, HR tech selection, org design. Every specialist we bring in has done the job at enterprise scale.
Scope expands mid-engagement and the bench expands with it. Scope tightens and we stop billing for bodies you do not need. No new SOW, no renegotiation, no second firm.
Whoever we pull in works from the same structured knowledge store your engagement is building. Nobody starts from scratch. Nobody duplicates questions.
Before you book the call
Deloitte sends a team of twenty generalists for eighteen months. We send three expert practitioners who have done the job you are trying to redesign, supported by a system that lets us move ten times faster. Our founders have run people analytics at Amazon, JPMorgan, Merck, and Nike. We are not learning your domain on your dime, and we are not staffing a pyramid.
They could, in theory. The practical problem is time. Your team is already running the function; discovery at this depth is a three-month sprint on top of their day jobs, and the methodology and system behind it took us years to build. We show up as the capacity they do not have, and we give them ongoing access to a knowledge store they can keep pulling answers from long after we are gone.
A typical Ikona engagement costs a fraction of what a big consultancy charges for the same scope, and the knowledge store it produces generates value for years. The return is measurable in two ways. First, the artifacts themselves: one hour against the knowledge store produced three business cases that would have cost $300,000 from a traditional firm. Second, every future question against that store produces another answer at near-zero marginal cost.
Spend it with us, and the other 13 compound.
Thirty minutes with a founder. No deck. No pitch. A conversation about the artifact you walk into the board meeting holding.
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