I recently chatted with Michael Haske, CEO of HR vendor isolved. Haske comes into this role with an interesting background. He spent approximately 30 years working in the HR field, 16 of those at Paylocity. More recently, he was with Krista.AI and picked up a considerable amount of knowledge about artificial intelligence.
Much of our conversation centered around new announcements isolved is making relative to AI. One part of that conversation focused on the company’s relationship with Anthropic. Haske indicated that users of these Claude AI capabilities will be doing so in the private version of Claude. This is critical as customers will not want any PII (personally identifiable information) or other business data potentially leaking into a public version of Claude.
isolved now has a people cloud connector for Claude (i.e., the isolved Connector for Claude). That connector permits users working in Claude to pass data, submit requests, etc. into the isolved HR solution without logging in and out of different solutions. This connector for Claude is an MCP (model context protocol) tool.
According to an isolved blog:
The connector launches with time-off management and expands across four tiers: retrieving information, completing transactions, surfacing workforce trends and connecting isolved data with the other tools people use at work. It’s the human-facing entry point — the first-place customers experience isolved meeting them inside the AI they already use. But it’s the doorway, not the destination.
The company is also releasing six new autonomous agents with highly descriptive names. These agents are:
the Guardian (It monitors payroll in real time)
the Advisor (it expedites employee Benefits enrollment)
the Signal (a retention tool)
the Orchestrator (expedites onboarding)
the Watchdog (tracks regulatory changes)
and the Helper (It resolves routine employee queries/requests).
The agents are focused on delivering an outcome not just accelerating a given activity. As described to me, they reflect an event-driven architecture environment and do not necessarily replicate a more traditional, bespoke HR solution. isolved intends to build 75 AI agents in the very near future. The functionality of these initial agents seems to replicate aspects of employee and manager self-service capabilities without requiring separate logins and additional security and administrivia work effort.
Haske also discussed isolved’s new Workforce Capital Management (WCM) solution. This tool puts humans and AI agents on an equal footing within a company and its HCM solutions.
isolved continues to grow. The company now counts approximately 200,000 employers as customers representing some 9 million employees. isolved itself now has over 3000 employees.
While much of the news focuses on isolved’s Anthropic relationship, the company wants to help customers track, support and enable agents from a variety of different sources. Additionally, the company will adopt a plug-and-play capability to work with other AI providers and agents from those systems.
Pricing for these new AI capabilities will be based on two dimensions. Some functions will be available as part of the base software subscription. Others, notably the more complex capabilities, may be based on outcomes or other factors.
So many of the AI HR solutions from other vendors have been minor apps (e.g., a generative AI tool to create job descriptions) or a modest sprinkling of some algorithmic or agentic AI on a pre-existing HR app. None of these could really be called transformative, radical or reimagined. They’ve been variants of the status quo.
Haske is aiming for something in-between for now. What isolved will deliver is more of a headless and event-driven capability where the software can notice something happening in the background and surface a potential resolution to the user. And, this can happen without requiring the user to connect into one or more different systems with multiple user interfaces, passwords, security protocols, etc.
For the near and mid-term future, it will be interesting to see what kind of uptake isolved gets with its AI solutions. My hunch is that larger customers will be the Early Adopters.
It will also be interesting to see the full list of 75 planned agents and whether any of these will be from third-parties. This could be an opening for partner firms (e.g., integrators, resellers, etc.) to create and monetize these AI assets.
Isolved appears to be creating an event-driven HR process world where the UX will be, in some applications, an AI prompt line. That’s a great, safe way to go but given the number and severity of HR challenges out there (e.g., massive delayering of management ranks, record resume fraud, etc.), all-new processes and AI tools will be needed. Radically re-thought existing processes and all new processes are the order of the day. Incremental zaps to existing HR/HCM tools just won’t cut it.
Image credit – Pixabay
We’ll send you our top articles (and no marketing spam), no more than once a week.
Browse our Executive Intelligence library and hear from industry thought leaders on a wide range of agenda-setting executive topics.
Listen to more episodes at https://diginomica.podbean.com/
diginomica and the diginomica logo are trademarks of diginomica Limited.
© Diginomica Limited and its licensors 2013- 2026
Developed by BRAINSUM.
Leave a Reply