The Future of HR Is Already at Work

In June, at our Connect for Partners event, we named a new category, Workforce Capital Management. It’s built on a simple premise: AI agents are workers, and workers belong on the same system of record as the people they work alongside.

That same month, Josh Bersin, one of the most respected voices in HR, introduced HR 2030, his research on where the HR function is headed. Reading it, I found a lot I agree with. Bersin sees a workforce made up of employees, contractors and AI agents, led by managers who handle people and agents together, with agents trained and managed like anyone else on the team.

Bersin came to his conclusion through research with some of the largest HR organizations in the world. We got there from the other end of the market, working with small and mid-sized businesses. When both ends arrive at the same answer on their own, the debate over whether agents belong in the workforce is closer to settled than most people think.

Most executives are already there. Mercer found that 82% of C-suite leaders see the future of HR as managing people and agents side by side.

The Same Future, Sized for Smaller Teams

An HR director at a 200-person manufacturer reads about HR 2030 between a payroll question and a benefits call. She’s nodding along. Then she gets to the part about rebuilding the function and thinks, that’s a great plan for a team of fifty. But I’m an HR team of one.

HR 2030 lays out the operating model for enterprise HR. Workforce Capital Management makes one workforce of people and agents practical at any size, starting with companies like hers, where the org chart, agents included, still fits on one page.

I’ve watched most big technology shifts start in the enterprise and work their way down from there. The budgets are bigger at the top, but the problems are the same. Smaller companies usually wait years until the enterprise has figured it out. Managing people and agents as one workforce can’t follow that pattern, because the agents aren’t waiting. They’re already showing up and operating in smaller companies.

Small and mid-sized companies are as complex as any enterprise, with a fraction of the people. They need AI agents that arrive ready to work, each with a defined job and a person accountable for them, inside the system that already runs their payroll, benefits and compliance. That’s how we build them at isolved. The Guardian, isolved’s AI agent for payroll, reviews every payroll run before it closes, flags potential errors and prepares the fix. A payroll admin approves it, and the mistake never reaches anyone’s paycheck.

Bersin is right to warn about agent sprawl, the pile of disconnected AI tools that slows a company down instead of speeding it up. Workers don’t sprawl. Each one has a job, a reporting line and a record that follows them from their first assignment to their last. Treat agents the same way, and HR can account for every one of them. The team that brought each agent in still decides what that agent does, and HR keeps the record, just as it does for every employee. For a small HR team, that means one record for the whole workforce instead of agents scattered across a dozen systems.

Ready Now

We independently arrived at the same place Bersin did. AI agents are workers, and they belong on the same record as the people beside them.

Our part is making it real for small and mid-sized businesses. The Guardian is live in their payroll, and we have more coming at HR Tech next week.

For the HR team of one, the future of HR has a start date, and it’s today.