New leadership at isolved is reshaping how the company serves its customers

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What’s new with HR tech? A lot, actually. To better understand AI readiness in HR, HR Brew explores the state of the industry, what’s being prioritized with AI, and what HR teams are doing to stay prepped. Read it here.

Michael Haske took the reins as CEO of HCM platform isolved in May. He was tasked with tackling the next phase of the software company’s growth amid the ongoing AI transformation, and grabbing what he sees as a real opportunity for small and medium businesses (SMBs) to harness the power of agentics.

HR Brew caught up with isolved at the HR Tech conference in Las Vegas earlier this month to see how the first few months of Haske’s tenure at the platform is going, talk about what’s next for isolved, and the HR of it all.

When he joined in May, Haske said “isolved was trying to be a lot of different things to a lot of different people, spreading itself too thin, so focusing on anything from one employee to 10,000 employees and everything in between.”

New North Star. Haske is in the middle of reshaping the company after a “North Star process” he began after joining that involved surveying his new employees, holding internal roundtable discussions, and reviewing market data. What emerged from that process was a clearer picture of where isolved could best serve the world of work.

“We should focus on the one-to-500 employee market,” he said. “We have three ways to show up: best service in the industry, a product that is powerful but easy to use—easy to use being very important—and showing up as a system of action and intelligence, which is a fancy way of talking about our AI strategy.”

To capture its target customers, Haske said isolved will rely on a twofold growth strategy. First up: its network of more than 250 partners across the country reselling the isolved product to small businesses with fewer than 50 employees.

“We’re going to exclusively focus our organic direct engine on the 50+ market at isolved, so that allows us to divide and conquer the market, but really skinny down the focus,” he said.

Haske told HR Brew he expects the internal transformation at isolved to wrap up in Q1 of 2027 and is looking to lock down “80–90%” of the changes before this year wraps up.

The fancy way to talk about AI strategy. The company’s AI priorities are built on three pillars. First, the company is partnering with Anthropic rather than building its own frontier AI model, leveraging Claude and its enterprise software connections to bolster the power of agents inside the isolved platform.

It’s also developing AI agents designed to own specific HR outcomes, rather than a specific task.

Ahead of the HR Tech conference, isolved announced the launch of Guardian, its first AI agent designed to own payroll preparation. It checks for errors and anomalies, makes corrections as permitted, and flags the issues that require a human to review before the payroll can be processed.

“That’s where real ROI is coming in from the agents that do succeed in the marketplace,” he told HR Brew. “So our first agent Guardian…does the work that the payroll person used to have to do, and turns to that person if it runs into something that it’s not comfortable doing because it hasn’t seen that before, and all of our agents will be similar.”

Finally, Haske also pointed to isolved’s “workforce capital management,” a system for handling records for AI agents alongside employees. Haske sees isolved as a tool to help customers track agent costs alongside labor costs and make better informed workforce decisions based on all of the ways work gets done.

“AI isn’t just software. It’s one part software, but it has very human needs that it must have to be successful,” he said. “It needs proper onboarding. It needs to be trained and constantly retrained, or it will drift. It needs a manager and a mentor to turn to when it needs help. It needs KPIs. It needs to be performance managed to make sure that it’s delivering at the level that we expect it to. And eventually, it needs to be offboarded properly and replaced by another agent at some point down the road, probably.”

If that all sounded very familiar (impressive, HR pro!), that’s because Haske’s also betting HR leaders can help execs reimagine the workplace and reinvent how work is done and make sense of the relationship between business outcomes and the investment (in human capital or technology) that’s required to achieve those outcomes.

“This is the same thing HR is already doing for the employee population,” he said. “What we’re really seeing is an evolution of the workplace, a combination of human and agentic workers side by side, and somebody needs to manage that workplace, and we’re going to try to help and put HR in position to do so.”