HR and People Ops Release Notes
Release notes for HR, payroll and people operations platforms
Products (7)
Latest HR and People Ops Updates
- Aug 31, 2026
- Date parsed from source:Aug 31, 2026
- First seen by Releasebot:Sep 1, 2026
Introducing Rippling Helpdesk: Agentic IT support that resolves tickets on arrival
Rippling launches Helpdesk, an IT support agent that handles routine employee requests faster with built-in employee, policy, app, and device context. It can answer questions, troubleshoot issues, route approvals, and take supported actions with full visibility and logging.
Today, we're launching Rippling Helpdesk, an IT support agent that resolves routine employee requests before they require manual IT work.
Requests like app access, password resets, device lockouts, and device replacements usually follow a known path: identify who is asking, apply the right policy, take the action, and record what happened. The answer may already be known, but an IT admin still has to repeat those steps across a message, a ticket, employee data, and the system where the work happens.
Helpdesk uses the employee, policy, app, and device context already in Rippling to do that work. It can answer questions, troubleshoot issues, route approvals, or take supported actions across Rippling IT. Admins decide what runs automatically, what needs approval, and what escalates. Every request and action remains visible and logged.
That means routine requests are resolved before they reach an admin, without losing the control or audit trail that IT relies on. Employees get help faster. IT spends less time repeating known steps and more time on issues that need judgment.
How Helpdesk works
Consider a familiar IT request: an employee tells Helpdesk, "My laptop is slow." Helpdesk doesn't begin with a generic troubleshooting script. Because it is built into Rippling, it can identify the employee, the device assigned to them, and the company policies that apply.
If the device is enrolled in Rippling MDM, Helpdesk can inspect details such as the laptop's age, its memory usage pattern, and which applications are running. It uses those signals to narrow down the cause and determine the next step.
If an application is consuming too much memory, Helpdesk can guide the employee to close it and restart the laptop. If troubleshooting doesn't resolve the problem and the device meets the company's replacement criteria, Helpdesk can start a replacement through Rippling Inventory Management. The replacement can proceed automatically or wait for approval, based on the company's policy for that role, tenure and device type. If the Helpdesk agent cannot resolve the issue, it escalates the request with the employee, device, and troubleshooting context already attached.
The employee gets help without waiting for an admin. IT keeps control over what runs automatically, what requires approval, and what escalates. The request and actions are recorded in an activity log.
Agentic support built into your IT stack
IT defines exactly what the agent is allowed to do and retains visibility with a full activity log covering every request, resolution, and escalation. There is no tradeoff between compliance and automation. You set the rules, the Helpdesk agent enforces them.
As recurring requests emerge, Helpdesk can suggest automations or reusable agent skills to handle the next one with less manual work.
Employees get help sooner, and admins can turn their attention from routine requests to strategic IT issues.
Start resolving tickets on arrival.
See Rippling Helpdesk in action.
DISCLAIMER
Rippling and its affiliates do not provide tax, accounting, or legal advice. This material has been prepared for informational purposes only, and is not intended to provide or be relied on for tax, accounting, or legal advice. You should consult your own tax, accounting, and legal advisors before engaging in any related activities or transactions.
Original source - Aug 31, 2026
- Date parsed from source:Aug 31, 2026
- First seen by Releasebot:Aug 31, 2026
Introducing Deel Retirement: A New Way to Offer Retirement Savings
Deel launches Deel Retirement in the US, embedding retirement plans from Basic Capital and Human Interest directly into the platform. It brings enrollment, contributions, payroll reconciliation, and employee 401(k) access into one place for simpler benefits management.
Retirement is the second-most requested employee benefit in the US, behind only medical.
Yet 70% of working Americans fear they're not saving enough for it.
Many are enrolled in a plan—they just can't see it. A login arrives for a portal they don't recognize, separate from their payslip and every other tool they use at work. They set their contribution and move on, hoping it went through.
Employers face the same disconnect from the other side. Contributions leave payroll manually each cycle. Someone exports a file, cross-references the figures, and fixes what doesn't match. The plan and payroll have never shared a record.
Most teams have built a process around this. That doesn't mean it works.
Today that changes. Deel Retirement is now available in the US. It’s a new way to manage your retirement benefits, with plans from Basic Capital and Human Interest embedded directly into the Deel platform. Instead of juggling portals, you manage enrollment, contributions, and reconciliation in the same place you already run payroll.
How Deel Retirement connects to payroll
The plan and payroll share the same record, so nothing moves between systems by hand. When an employee changes their contribution rate, payroll updates automatically. Finance sees every deduction in one ledger. HR stops chasing files and saves hours of admin overhead every month.
A fuller financial picture for your employees
Most retirement plans ask employees to care about something they can't easily see, in a system they don't regularly visit, managed separately from their employee record.
When retirement is built into Deel, your employee opens the same app they already use, sees their 401(k), chooses their contributions, sees the employer match, and follows how the plan performs, right next to their payslips and their benefits. They can see what they have, use it without raising a ticket, and trust that it's accurate.
It doesn't stop at enrollment. When they want to increase their contributions or check how their fund is performing, it's all in the same place. That matters because people don't think about retirement in isolation. They think about it alongside what they earn, what they spend, and what they're building toward.
Employees with access to a retirement plan are 15 times more likely to save for retirement, and putting that plan where they already engage with their pay removes the friction that stops them from starting.
Get started with Deel Retirement
Ready to simplify your benefits? Deel embeds plans from market-approved retirement providers directly into the platform, letting you set up your plan, choose your benefits, and invite your employees all in one place. Whether you're setting up a 401(k) for the first time or moving on from manual workarounds, this is the new standard.
Original source All of your release notes in one feed
Join Releasebot and get updates from Rippling and hundreds of other software products.
- Aug 23, 2026
- Date parsed from source:Aug 23, 2026
- First seen by Releasebot:Aug 24, 2026
Singapore (SG) Release Notes - Week 34, 2026
Employment Hero releases a broad August update with stronger reporting, onboarding, payroll, security, and recruitment tools, plus wider access to Doc Studio, improved leave request automation, clearer permissions, better email and ticket visibility, and new rostering and timesheet controls.
Automations
Added Compensation Cycles as a data source in Build Your Own Report, allowing HR admins to combine compensation review data with other employee reporting data in a single export for faster analysis and decision-making. (Released: 19 August 2026, HR Admins and managers with reporting access)
Added Preview Mode to the Custom Forms builder so form creators can review layout, test validation, and confirm how draft forms will appear before publishing them to employees. (Released: 19 August 2026, HR Admins and Managers)
Core HR
Added a date-only field type for additional information fields, making it easier for admins to collect consistent date-based information. (Released: 20 August 2026)
Added flexible certification timing in onboarding so admins can choose which certifications must be completed during onboarding and which can be completed afterward with reminders and due dates. (Released: 20 August 2026)
Added required subject lines to new management notes, making notes easier to search, organise, and audit. Existing notes can also be updated with a subject line. (Released: 18 August 2026)
Added the Worker Code column to people reports, helping teams filter and align report data with compliance reporting requirements. (Released: 18 August 2026)
Doc Studio is now available to all customers for creating new templates, making the new document editing experience broadly accessible across organisations. (Released: 17 August 2026)
Updated Doc Studio’s variable library to label volunteer-related variables more clearly, making template creation easier for organisations managing volunteer documentation. (Released: 18 August 2026)
ITOps & Security
Added support for integration builders to retrieve leave requests with a new employee-specific endpoint and enhanced filtering on the organisation-level endpoint, improving efficiency for leave-related integrations. (Released: 19 August 2026)
Added support for programmatically approving and declining leave requests through OpenAPI, enabling more automated approval workflows. (Released: 19 August 2026)
Added support for programmatically updating and permanently deleting leave requests through OpenAPI, helping integrations keep leave data accurate without manual platform access. (Released: 17 August 2026)
Added step-up identity verification for sensitive payroll account changes, helping protect payroll users when updating passwords, email addresses, or two-factor authentication settings. (Released: 19 August 2026, All users)
Added extra recaptcha checks to the payroll login flow, improving protection against automated attacks and aligning payroll login controls with HR. (Released: 18 August 2026, Payroll Web Users)
Added a new permission for viewing the Access Permissions widget in the employee file, allowing organisations to grant view-only access without full admin rights. (Released: 17 August 2026, Admins, owners, and assigned users)
Added a new permission for viewing payslips and payslip history in the employee file, allowing authorised users to view, download, and print payslips without needing full admin or owner access. (Released: 17 August 2026, Admins, owners, and assigned users)
Enhanced the request ticket portal with comments, ticket history, priority levels, assignment options, and improved ticket navigation to make request management easier and more transparent. (Released: August 2026, visibility based on request ticket feature access)
Simplified switching between payroll two-factor authentication methods during login, reducing the process to a single click. (Released: 17 August 2026, Payroll Web Users)
Payroll
Added an Active only filter to the Rule Tester so payroll admins can quickly see which rules actually applied in a test, reducing clutter when reviewing large rule sets. (Released: 19 August 2026, users with Rule Tester access)
Payroll Ops
Added automatic weekend adjustments for forecasted pay dates and task deadlines in Payroll Service Hub, along with schedule guardrails and a live preview of projected pay dates before saving. (Released: 14 August 2026)
Platform Experience
Added dedicated CSS permissions for the Organisation Emails page, giving admins more granular control over who can access delivery settings, delivery logs, and audit logs. (Released: 14 August 2026)
Added email delivery and audit logs across organisation emails and templates, giving admins better visibility into email status, troubleshooting, and configuration history. (Released: 14 August 2026)
Recruitment
Added a dashboard credit-balance widget and upgrade path for SARA Free users, making it easier to understand plan options and move to paid Recruitment Agent plans. (Released: 19 August 2026, SARA PLG users)
Added a first-login two-factor authentication bypass for SARA Free users so they can reach ATS immediately after activation, with two-factor authentication enforced from their second login onward. (Released: 18 August 2026, SARA PLG users)
Refreshed SmartMatch tokenised job pages so candidates can see richer job details, salary information, AI-generated summaries, personalised match insights, and sticky response actions. (Released: 17 August 2026, Candidates)
Updated hiring stage setup with a more consistent card layout, clearer enabled-state details, inline setup improvements, and automatic conflict prevention between incompatible options. (Released: 13 August 2026, Recruiters)
Rostering & Timesheets
Added standalone photo capture to Hero Time Clock so organisations can capture clock-in and clock-out photos without needing facial recognition enabled. (Released: 18 August 2026, Admins and owners with kiosks)
Added bulk updates for timesheet and clocking access settings, making it faster for admins to manage access across large employee groups. (Released: August 2026, organisations with access to the new timesheet settings)
Original source - Aug 21, 2026
- Date parsed from source:Aug 21, 2026
- First seen by Releasebot:Aug 21, 2026
Week 31 2026 | Release Notes
Employment Hero adds major AI upgrades across HeroAI and workflows, plus payroll, recruitment, HR, and performance management improvements. The week’s releases bring clearer AI guidance, richer reporting, stronger security, more flexible payroll controls, and smoother hiring and review experiences.
Here are our product releases for Week 31 of 2026, which includes July 27 - 31, 2026.
AI
- HeroAI now shows a live thought process that explains the searches, lookups, and actions it is taking before presenting an answer, giving users more transparency and confidence while keeping the workspace tidy once the task is complete. (Released: 29 July 2026, All HeroAI users on web and desktop)
- Hero AI can now answer questions about a specific candidate directly from their profile, explain scoring, compare candidates side by side, and help draft interview questions or email invites without recruiters leaving the ATS workflow. (Released: 29 July 2026, Recruitment admins, hiring managers, collaborators)
- Hero AI can now help recruiters review video interview evaluations and in-person panel feedback directly from the HR dashboard, making it easier to understand interview outcomes and identify candidates needing attention. (Released: 29 July 2026, Recruitment admins, hiring managers, collaborators)
Automations
- Added in-canvas AI editing to the report builder so users can add, remove, or adjust modules and fields in new or existing reports using plain-language instructions, while reviewing changes before applying them. (Released: 28 July 2026, Admins, Owners, and Managers)
- Added a read-only workflow run log so admins can inspect workflow histories, filter runs by status and date, identify failed or stuck runs faster, and investigate issues without risking accidental edits to live workflows. (Released: 28 July 2026, Employment Unlimited and HR Elite customers)
Core HR
- Added worker code columns to compliance reports, including sorting and CSV export support, making it easier for admins to review and share compliance data. (Released: 28 July 2026, All plans)
- Added management notes to contractor profiles so admins can create, view, edit, and delete notes directly within the contractor record. (Released: 28 July 2026, Essentials+)
- Added an audit trail tab to contractor records so admins and owners can review contractor-related audit history directly from the employee file. (Released: 28 July 2026, Essentials+)
- Admins can now create and apply additional information fields to volunteer profiles, including onboarding fields, with all updates tracked in the audit trail. (Released: 24 July 2026, Global Engage+ customers)
ITOps & Security
- Added a new Company Feed Post Insights permission so admins can grant selected non-admin users access to post engagement data through permission groups. (Released: 29 July 2026, Admins, Owners, and team members managing Company Feed reporting)
- Added SMS rate limiting to payroll user 2FA setup in the EH Work app to better protect payroll accounts from SMS pumping attacks and align the mobile experience with web safeguards. (Released: 27 July 2026, Payroll EH Work users)
Mid-market
- Expanded Employee File Change workflow email variables so approval notifications can include richer employee, manager, and custom field details, helping approvers make faster decisions without logging into the platform. (Released: 24 July 2026, Where workflows are supported)
- HR administrators can now exclude specific employment types, groups, and worker cohorts from milestone rewards, giving organisations more control over who receives automated HeroPoints for birthdays and work anniversaries. (Released: 30 July 2026, Global)
- Admins can now export HeroPoints transaction data as a CSV for financial reporting, making it easier to reconcile spending across entities, cost centres, departments, and employee structures. (Released: 30 July 2026, Global)
OpenAPI & Developer Experience
- Employment Hero’s developer documentation now provides a dedicated page and markdown version for each API endpoint, along with improved AI discovery through llms.txt, sitemap.xml, and robots.txt updates. (Released: 28 July 2026, Developers and integration users)
Payroll
- Payroll teams can now configure and use off-cycle pay schedules in Payroll Service Hub, making it easier to create off-cycle pay runs without generating unnecessary forecasted pay cases. (Released: 28 July 2026)
- Payroll partners can now edit pay dates on upcoming paycases and update payroll task deadlines directly, helping them correct dates affected by weekends or public holidays without impacting future cycles. (Released: 28 July 2026)
Performance Management
- Custom Surveys now include in-platform reporting with a dedicated Results tab, completion statistics, per-question breakdowns, and aggregated CSV exports, making it easier for admins to review survey outcomes without leaving the platform. (Released: 27 July 2026, Customers with Custom Surveys)
- Hero AI now shows the review subject automatically when opened from a 360 review page, helping users ask more relevant questions without manually specifying who the review is about. (Released: 27 July 2026, Global, Premium, Platinum, Plus, Unlimited, Engage, Elite)
- Hero AI now shows the review subject automatically when opened from a performance review page, making review discussions more focused and context-aware. (Released: 27 July 2026, Global, Premium, Platinum, Plus, Unlimited, Engage, Elite)
- Hero AI now shows the compensation review subject automatically when opened from a compensation management page, helping users ask context-aware compensation questions more easily. (Released: 29 July 2026, Global, Premium, Platinum, Plus, Unlimited, Engage, Elite)
Platform Experience
- Customers can now customise organisation email templates for 360 reviews, performance reviews, and timesheets while preserving the underlying template logic and formatting rules. (Released: 29 July 2026, Premium, Platinum, Unlimited, Unlimited Lite, Unlimited Plus, Engage, Elite)
- Updated the mobile notification bell so it opens a standalone full-screen notifications page from anywhere in the app, letting users review notifications without losing their place. (Released: 27 July 2026, All EH Work users)
Recruitment
- Improved the candidate activation flow to reduce friction during applications, increase CV upload success, and help more candidates complete job applications successfully. (Released: July 2026, Job seekers)
- Recruiters can now mark jobs as confidential so only explicitly selected hiring team members can view the role, candidates, and activity, supporting sensitive hiring scenarios. (Released: 29 July 2026, Recruitment admins and hiring managers)
- Updated the free standalone Recruitment Agent activation flow so recruiters can create a job with just a title, move through setup more quickly, and receive better guidance during account activation. (Released: 28 July 2026, New free standalone Recruitment Agent customers)
- Delivered a set of LinkedIn integration fixes that improve location handling, source tracking, and job feed behaviour, helping recruiters post more accurately and report candidate sources more reliably. (Released: 29 July 2026, Recruitment admins and hiring managers)
- Recruiters posting jobs to LinkedIn Premium can now manually override incorrect or missing locations directly in the posting form, helping jobs reach the right audience without needing support assistance. (Released: 30 July 2026, Global)
- Aug 21, 2026
- Date parsed from source:Aug 21, 2026
- First seen by Releasebot:Aug 21, 2026
Week 30 2026 | Release Notes
Employment Hero releases Week 30 updates across AI, HR, Leave, Payroll, Recruitment, and platform tools, adding richer Hero AI context and learning insights, smoother leave and onboarding workflows, stronger rostering and security, and clearer admin and reporting experiences.
Here are our product releases for Week 30 of 2026, which includes July 20 - 24, 2026.
AI
- Hero AI now shows an employee context banner when opened from a 1:1 session page, helping managers ask questions about the right employee without manually adding extra context. (Released: 22 July 2026, Global, Premium, Platinum, Plus, Unlimited, Engage, Elite)
- Hero AI can now answer questions about learning assignments, due dates, overdue items, and team learning progress based on each user’s existing permissions. (Released: 17 July 2026, Global, Premium, Platinum, Plus, Unlimited, Engage, Elite)
- Hero AI can now summarise performance review feedback, highlight strengths and development areas, identify recurring themes, and surface review status using each user’s existing review permissions. (Released: 21 July 2026, Global, Premium, Platinum, Plus, Unlimited, Engage, Elite)
- HeroAI users on web can now mention colleagues directly in chat from a dropdown, making questions more precise and improving search accuracy when multiple people share similar names. (Released: 22 July 2026, All HeroAI users on web/desktop)
Core HR
- Contractor profiles and contractor onboarding now support emergency contacts, bringing the contractor experience in line with the employee experience. (Released: 21 July 2026, All regions, Essentials and above)
- Document templates can now use an employee FTE hours variable sourced from the full-time equivalent weekly hours field in salary data. (Released: 21 July 2026, All regions, Essentials and above)
- Document templates can now include both primary and additional cost centre values from the employee file, making document generation more flexible. (Released: 21 July 2026, All regions, Essentials and above)
- Employee, volunteer, and contractor profiles now retain policy visibility after termination in most cases, helping organisations preserve policy history and status. (Released: 20 July 2026, All regions, All plans)
HR Rostering & Timesheets
- Admins and owners using Hero Time Clock can now securely log out or switch kiosks directly from the app, removing the need for a reinstall workaround. (Released: 20 July 2026, Admins and owners in W&P orgs using HTC)
- Admins and owners in cost-centre-based rostering organisations now see an upgrade prompt for worksites and positions directly in roster management. (Released: 21 July 2026, Admins and owners in CC orgs)
ITOps & Security
- Payroll business users can now add an SSO email address and enable SSO during user onboarding, reducing setup steps for organisations with SSO enabled. (Released: 20 July 2026, Payroll business users with SSO enabled)
Leave
- The employee profile now includes a dedicated leave section, bringing balances, requests, and leave actions into one place for a more complete leave management experience. (Released: 22 July 2026, All customers)
- Leave calendar views now use the new Calendar UI across the dashboard widget, employee leave calendar, and leave management calendar for a more consistent experience. (Released: 23 July 2026, UK, CA, SEA and all orgs created after 1 June 2026)
- Open-ended leave is now visually distinguished in the Calendar UI with a filled first-day marker, hatched continuation, and end-date messaging to make leave status easier to understand at a glance. (Released: 22 July 2026, UK, CA, SEA and all orgs created after 1 June 2026)
- Sickness reports now display absence rate visually across team, reason, and day-of-week charts, making trends easier to interpret. (Released: 23 July 2026, UK, CA, SEA paid plans with sickness reporting)
OpenAPI & Developer Experience
- Rostered shifts OpenAPI endpoints now follow the platform’s rostering permissions model, allowing authorised team members to use integrations without needing admin or owner credentials. (Released: 20 July 2026, Team members with rostering permissions)
Other
- Custom forms can now include pending employees in Employee Picker fields, making it easier to complete forms for new starters before they accept their invitation. (Released: 21 July 2026, Global)
- HR admins can now build bulk Hero Points recipient lists using organisational filters such as entity, location, group, worker type, and employment type, making large-scale recognition campaigns faster and more accurate. (Released: 20 July 2026, Global where Hero Points are offered)
- Onboarding workflow emails now support expanded employee, manager, and custom field variables so shared service teams can prepare equipment, access, and services without logging into the platform. (Released: 23 July 2026, Global where workflows are supported)
- Offboarding workflow emails now support expanded employee, manager, termination, and custom field variables so shared service teams can revoke access, recover equipment, and process final pay more efficiently. (Released: 23 July 2026, Global where workflows are supported)
Payroll
- Payroll users now see clearer progress indicators for pay category updates, while new API and webhook support improves visibility and coordination during update processing. (Released: 15 July 2026, Payroll users, all plans)
Performance Management
- Chat now sends a single unread message reminder email after 48 hours, helping members return to stalled conversations without receiving duplicate reminder emails. (Released: 20 July 2026, Employment Unlimited and Chat add-on customers)
- Compensation Management now supports 0% guidance increases, multi-select filters, and clearer visibility help text for cycle setup and review. (Released: 21 July 2026, Global)
Platform Experience
- Branding settings now prevent low-contrast colour combinations from being saved, helping organisations maintain accessible and legible client-facing interfaces. (Released: 1 July 2026, All regions with branding access)
- Organisation email management now offers a consolidated editor and preview experience alongside a clearer table view, helping admins review and update email settings more efficiently. (Released: 22 July 2026, All regions)
Recruitment
- ATS users using the platform’s native email channel can now see candidate email replies within minutes instead of waiting up to a day, with a new unread indicator to highlight activity. (Released: 23 July 2026, Global ATS users using the native ATS email channel)
- Aug 20, 2026
- Date parsed from source:Aug 20, 2026
- First seen by Releasebot:Aug 24, 2026
Introducing Rippling AI Governance: Get your AI house in order
Rippling introduces AI Governance, a new suite that brings visibility and control to AI usage, spend, access, and agents. MCP Gateway and Agent Identity Management are live today, while AI Gateway and Shadow AI Detection are available via waitlist.
Today, we're introducing Rippling AI Governance
A suite of products that helps companies scale AI usage without losing track of spend, access, or accountability. It connects AI activity to the workforce context already in Rippling, so companies can move from reacting to AI sprawl after it happens to governing AI at the moment it's used.
Built on Rippling's employee graph, AI Governance gives IT leaders one place to understand AI usage and spend, control access to models and tools, and manage agents throughout their lifecycle, with policies that map to each employee's team and role.
AI adoption has outrun AI governance
Companies are under pressure to scale AI, but the systems to govern it haven't kept up. Leaders face three problems:
- They can't see or control AI usage and spend. Data is scattered across vendor consoles, invoices, API logs, spreadsheets, and unmanaged accounts. Finance sees the spend after the fact, while IT has to explain what changed without a reliable view of the people, teams, models, and workflows driving it.
- They can't reliably secure what employees and agents can access or do. Model access, tool permissions, and data security policies live across separate systems. Controls are often manual, vendor-specific, or applied only after access has spread.
- They can't reliably identify and manage agents. Agents often run through shared keys, generic service accounts, or repurposed employee credentials. That makes it difficult to determine who is responsible, what an agent can access, what it has done, and what should happen when its owner changes roles or leaves.
That leaves companies with two bad options: move quickly and accept rising costs and security risks, or lock AI down and miss out on productivity gains.
Govern AI usage, spend, access, and agents from one platform
For leaders tasked with efficiently scaling AI across their organization, Rippling AI Governance is a set of software tools that allows companies to measure and control AI usage. This is a suite of products that, taken together, give admins a comprehensive set of controls for managing the use of AI within their organization. Rippling routes employees' LLM traffic, governs tool access, surfaces unsanctioned AI usage, and manages agent identity, all through the organizational context that makes policies enforceable. Our promise is to help companies scale AI adoption without losing control of spend, access, or auditability.
Employees can activate an agent and delegate their identity. Agents working autonomously can also use their own identity without a human delegating permissions.
What we're launching
MCP Gateway
AI agents become useful when they can act on information, not simply answer questions. An AI agent decides how to complete a task. Model Context Protocol, or MCP, connects it to the tools, data, and systems it needs to do so. An MCP Gateway controls which of those connections and actions are allowed.
As employees connect AI tools to more business systems, every unmanaged connection creates another path to sensitive data that IT can't reliably see, control, or audit. IT may not know what is connected, who is using it, or what actions they can take once connected.
Rippling MCP Gateway gives IT a controlled entry point for supported MCP connections. The model is familiar: IAM governs which SaaS apps employees can access. MCP Gateway governs which company systems employees and agents can reach through AI, and what they can do once connected. Before a tool call runs, Rippling checks who is making the request and whether the relevant policy allows it. The call is then recorded for review.
That control goes deeper than deciding whether a connection can exist. An engineer may have broad access to GitHub, but an AI agent working on their behalf shouldn't automatically receive the same permissions. The agent might be allowed to read approved repositories and open pull requests, while being blocked from deleting branches, changing repository settings, modifying secrets, force-pushing code, or accessing security-sensitive repositories outside the engineer's team. MCP Gateway governs what an agent can do through a connection, not simply whether it can connect.
Because Rippling already knows each employee's role, team, and employment status, access updates automatically when employees join, change roles or teams, or leave the company. A standalone gateway has to import and maintain that context from external identity systems. Rippling starts with it.
With Rippling MCP Gateway, companies can connect AI to more of the business without losing control of who can access each system or what they can do within it.
AI Gateway*
AI spend is becoming one of the hardest software costs for companies to manage. Employees and agents can call OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and other providers directly, often across multiple tools and subscriptions. Finance sees the bill after the fact. IT sees only part of the access picture. And leaders struggle to answer the basic questions: who is using which models, which teams are driving spend, and where should usage be limited or optimized?
Rippling AI Gateway gives companies one governed path for LLM traffic. It sits between employees, apps, agents, and model providers, so admins can control access to models, set budgets, enforce spend limits, and log usage with the employee and organization context already in Rippling.
That matters because AI governance is not just about saying yes or no to AI. It is making sure the right people have the right level of access, at the right cost. A security engineering team may need frontier models for complex work, while other teams can be steered toward faster, lower-cost models for everyday tasks. With AI Gateway, companies can route the right traffic to lower-cost models, set hard budget caps, and block usage when limits are reached.
The result is governance and spend management in the same system. Companies get visibility into model usage and cost by user, team, department, provider, and model, auditability for every request, and controls that apply at the moment AI is used, not weeks later when the invoice arrives.
Agent Identity Management
Agents are becoming a new class of worker. They can hold credentials, access apps, call tools, and take action across the business. But without a clear identity and owner, an agent can quickly become a security and audit risk: no one knows exactly what it can access, what it has done, or how to revoke it.
With Rippling Agent Identity Management, companies can create and manage agent records alongside employees and service accounts. Admins can assign owners, set permissions, and provision agents into third-party apps using the same access controls they already use in Rippling.
That means every agent can be known, owned, permissioned, auditable, and revocable from one system. Agent Identity Management gives companies the foundation to put agents to work safely, without letting them become invisible, shared, or unmanaged accounts.
An agent can act through permissions delegated by an employee or through its own managed identity. In either case, admins can see who owns it, what it can access, how much it spends, and what it does.
Shadow AI Detection*
Shadow IT has always been a problem for IT teams. Employees find a tool that helps them move faster, start using it before it has been reviewed, and suddenly the company has software with no clear owner, policy, or audit trail. Shadow AI raises the stakes. An unapproved AI tool may not just store data; it may read files, connect to apps, process sensitive information, call tools, or keep running as an agent.
Rippling Shadow AI Detection helps companies find AI usage they did not provision. It gives admins visibility into unapproved AI apps, third-party OAuth connections, browser extensions, coding assistants, local agents, and MCP servers, then connects that activity back to the employee, device, app, and organization context in Rippling.
From there, admins can decide what should happen next. They can approve a tool, restrict it, notify employees to move to an approved alternative, revoke risky access, or bring usage into a managed path through Rippling AI Gateway or MCP Gateway. The goal is not to slow AI adoption down. It is to make the approved path easier, safer, and more visible than the unmanaged one.
This completes the AI governance story. MCP Gateway governs how AI connects to business tools. AI Gateway governs model usage and spend. Agent Identity Management makes non-human actors known and accountable. Shadow AI Detection finds the activity happening outside those approved paths, so companies can scale AI without losing sight of what is actually being used.
Get started today
AI adoption isn't slowing down. The companies that scale it well won't be the ones that move fastest or impose blanket restrictions. They'll be the ones that build governance into the same infrastructure that already runs their business. That's what Rippling AI Governance is: visibility and control over AI, built on the employee graph that already powers everything else.
MCP Gateway and Agent Identity Management are live today. See them in action.
*Join the waitlist for AI Gateway and Shadow AI Detection.
DISCLAIMER
Rippling and its affiliates do not provide tax, accounting, or legal advice. This material has been prepared for informational purposes only, and is not intended to provide or be relied on for tax, accounting, or legal advice. You should consult your own tax, accounting, and legal advisors before engaging in any related activities or transactions.
Original source - Aug 13, 2026
- Date parsed from source:Aug 13, 2026
- First seen by Releasebot:Aug 21, 2026
Week 34 2026 | Release Notes
Employment Hero releases a broad Week 34 update across HR, payroll, security, recruitment, and rostering, adding stronger reporting, new form and Doc Studio tools, richer leave and email controls, tighter payroll protections, and smoother candidate and timesheet workflows.
Here are our product releases for Week 34 of 2026, which includes August 17 - 21, 2026.
Automations
- Added Compensation Cycles as a data source in Build Your Own Report, allowing HR admins to combine compensation review data with other employee reporting data in a single export for faster analysis and decision-making. (Released: 19 August 2026, HR Admins and managers with reporting access)
- Added Preview Mode to the Custom Forms builder so form creators can review layout, test validation, and confirm how draft forms will appear before publishing them to employees. (Released: 19 August 2026, HR Admins and Managers)
Core HR
- Added a date-only field type for additional information fields, making it easier for admins to collect consistent date-based information. (Released: 20 August 2026)
- Added flexible certification timing in onboarding so admins can choose which certifications must be completed during onboarding and which can be completed afterward with reminders and due dates. (Released: 20 August 2026)
- Added required subject lines to new management notes, making notes easier to search, organise, and audit. Existing notes can also be updated with a subject line. (Released: 18 August 2026)
- Added the Worker Code column to people reports, helping teams filter and align report data with compliance reporting requirements. (Released: 18 August 2026)
- Doc Studio is now available to all customers for creating new templates, making the new document editing experience broadly accessible across organisations. (Released: 17 August 2026)
- Updated Doc Studio’s variable library to label volunteer-related variables more clearly, making template creation easier for organisations managing volunteer documentation. (Released: 18 August 2026)
ITOps & Security
- Added support for integration builders to retrieve leave requests with a new employee-specific endpoint and enhanced filtering on the organisation-level endpoint, improving efficiency for leave-related integrations. (Released: 19 August 2026)
- Added support for programmatically approving and declining leave requests through OpenAPI, enabling more automated approval workflows. (Released: 19 August 2026)
- Added support for programmatically updating and permanently deleting leave requests through OpenAPI, helping integrations keep leave data accurate without manual platform access. (Released: 17 August 2026)
- Added step-up identity verification for sensitive payroll account changes, helping protect payroll users when updating passwords, email addresses, or two-factor authentication settings. (Released: 19 August 2026, All users)
- Added extra recaptcha checks to the payroll login flow, improving protection against automated attacks and aligning payroll login controls with HR. (Released: 18 August 2026, Payroll Web Users)
- Added a new permission for viewing the Access Permissions widget in the employee file, allowing organisations to grant view-only access without full admin rights. (Released: 17 August 2026, Admins, owners, and assigned users)
- Added a new permission for viewing payslips and payslip history in the employee file, allowing authorised users to view, download, and print payslips without needing full admin or owner access. (Released: 17 August 2026, Admins, owners, and assigned users)
- Enhanced the request ticket portal with comments, ticket history, priority levels, assignment options, and improved ticket navigation to make request management easier and more transparent. (Released: August 2026, visibility based on request ticket feature access)
- Simplified switching between payroll two-factor authentication methods during login, reducing the process to a single click. (Released: 17 August 2026, Payroll Web Users)
Payroll
- Added an Active only filter to the Rule Tester so payroll admins can quickly see which rules actually applied in a test, reducing clutter when reviewing large rule sets. (Released: 19 August 2026, users with Rule Tester access)
Payroll Ops
- Added automatic weekend adjustments for forecasted pay dates and task deadlines in Payroll Service Hub, along with schedule guardrails and a live preview of projected pay dates before saving. (Released: 14 August 2026)
Platform Experience
- Added dedicated CSS permissions for the Organisation Emails page, giving admins more granular control over who can access delivery settings, delivery logs, and audit logs. (Released: 14 August 2026)
- Added email delivery and audit logs across organisation emails and templates, giving admins better visibility into email status, troubleshooting, and configuration history. (Released: 14 August 2026)
Recruitment
- Added a dashboard credit-balance widget and upgrade path for SARA Free users, making it easier to understand plan options and move to paid Recruitment Agent plans. (Released: 19 August 2026, SARA PLG users)
- Added a first-login two-factor authentication bypass for SARA Free users so they can reach ATS immediately after activation, with two-factor authentication enforced from their second login onward. (Released: 18 August 2026, SARA PLG users)
- Refreshed SmartMatch tokenised job pages so candidates can see richer job details, salary information, AI-generated summaries, personalised match insights, and sticky response actions. (Released: 17 August 2026, Candidates)
- Updated hiring stage setup with a more consistent card layout, clearer enabled-state details, inline setup improvements, and automatic conflict prevention between incompatible options. (Released: 13 August 2026, Recruiters)
Rostering & Timesheets
- Added standalone photo capture to Hero Time Clock so organisations can capture clock-in and clock-out photos without needing facial recognition enabled. (Released: 18 August 2026, Admins and owners with kiosks)
- Added bulk updates for timesheet and clocking access settings, making it faster for admins to manage access across large employee groups. (Released: August 2026, organisations with access to the new timesheet settings)
- Aug 13, 2026
- Date parsed from source:Aug 13, 2026
- First seen by Releasebot:Aug 21, 2026
Week 32 2026 | Release Notes
Employment Hero adds AI-powered support, HR, rostering, security, payroll API, performance, platform, and recruitment updates across Week 32, including incident-aware HeroAI, new issues summary and compliance tools, smarter roster controls, and faster candidate and payslip workflows.
Here are our product releases for Week 32 of 2026, which includes August 3 - 7, 2026.
AI
- HeroAI can now detect product gaps during customer conversations and prompt admins to submit a feature request on the spot, helping teams capture missing capability feedback without leaving the chat. (Released: 30 July 2026, Admins interacting with HeroAI)
- HeroAI now detects active problem tickets in Zendesk and adds customer-facing incident updates and available workarounds to relevant troubleshooting responses, helping customers get accurate information faster during live incidents. (Released: 31 July 2026, All customers using Hero AI)
Core HR
- Customers can now access a single Issues Summary Hub that brings together workforce data issues across employee files, salary versions, contractor files, lodgement, leave requests, timesheets, expenses, and work eligibility, with dashboard visibility for eligible plans. (Released: 3 August 2026, All sub-plans for Hub; HR Elite and Unlimited for Dashboard; SG release)
- HR admins can now automate recurring compliance tasks with reusable templates, shared ownership, scheduled distribution, and automatic assignment for new joiners in targeted groups. (Released: 3 August 2026, All sub-plans, SG release)
HR Rostering & Timesheets
- Employees and managers can now complete more day-to-day rostering tasks using natural language with Hero AI, including visibility into shifts, roster gaps, staffing coverage, publishing, editing, and compliance checks. (Released: 3 August 2026, Organisations using work sites and position rostering)
- Managers can now configure operating hours, default shift durations, and break lengths for each work site by day, helping speed up roster creation and support more intelligent staffing decisions. (Released: 4 August 2026, Organisations using Work Sites & Positions)
- Managers can now see staffing requirements directly inside the roster with visual indicators that show whether positions are understaffed, fully staffed, or overstaffed, making roster decisions faster and easier. (Released: 30 July 2026, Organisations using work sites and positions rostering)
ITOps & Security
- Organisations can now delegate permissions management to selected non-admin users through a dedicated general permission, while keeping control of permission assignment with admins and owners. (Released: 4 August 2026, Admins, Owners, and delegated users)
- Customers using the request ticket portal can now manage boards in a table view, create new boards from settings, archive boards, assign unique ticket codes, and configure default SLA settings more easily. (Released: 5 August 2026, Visibility follows the main request ticket portal release)
Leave & Time Off
- Customers in Singapore can now create, view, edit, and delete custom events across Employment Hero calendar surfaces, with configurable permissions for who can manage them. (Released: 5 August 2026, SG release)
OpenAPI & Developer Experience
- Integration engineers can now publish, unpublish, archive, unarchive, and delete pay periods programmatically through new lifecycle endpoints, reducing reliance on manual platform actions. (Released: 4 August 2026, Integration engineers)
- Integration engineers can now upload and create up to five payslips in a single API request, making automated payslip distribution easier at scale. (Released: 4 August 2026, Integration engineers)
- Integration engineers can now update payslip display names, reassign payslips to different employees, or delete individual payslips programmatically. (Released: 6 August 2026, Integration engineers)
Performance Management
- Product owners can now configure suggested Hero AI prompts independently for individual Performance Review-related SAP pages, so updates to one page no longer affect others. (Released: 3 August 2026, Global plans including Premium, Platinum, Plus, Unlimited, Engage, and Elite)
Platform Experience
- Customers can now customise additional organisation email templates for time unavailability and company feed notifications while preserving the logic that powers dynamic email content. (Released: 4 August 2026, Premium, Platinum, Unlimited, Unlimited Lite, Unlimited Plus, Engage, and Elite customers)
- HR users now get a more consistent table row actions layout across high-traffic features, making common actions easier to find and reducing visual clutter across the platform. (Released: 6 August 2026, HR users)
Recruitment
- Recruiters and hiring managers can now automatically invite eligible Employment Hero candidates to free AI video interviews, helping pre-qualified candidates become decision-ready faster. (Released: 4 August 2026, Recruiters and Hiring managers)
- Recruiters can now filter candidate lists using plain-language prompts based on score, location, and every screening answer type, helping them identify relevant candidates faster. (Released: 5 August 2026, Recruitment users)
- Organisation owners and admins can now manage the visibility of Salary Benchmarking and Find Talent directly from menu customisation settings without developer intervention. (Released: 31 July 2026, Organisation Owners and Admins)
- Aug 13, 2026
- Date parsed from source:Aug 13, 2026
- First seen by Releasebot:Aug 14, 2026
Week 33, 2026 | Release notes
Employment Hero adds AI-powered timesheets, mobile HeroAI upgrades, broader HR and payroll reporting, stronger security logs, unified calendar access, and new EH Work and rostering tools across web, mobile, and API.
AI
Employees and managers can now create, update, delete, summarise, and approve timesheets using natural language through HeroAI on web and EH Work, making day-to-day timesheet tasks faster and easier to complete. (Released: 12 August 2026, All regions and orgs)
Mobile users can now @mention colleagues directly in HeroAI chat, making people-related queries faster and more accurate. (Released: 10 August 2026, All HeroAI users on mobile)
Mobile users can now view HeroAI’s live thought process as it searches, looks up information, and completes actions before returning a final answer. (Released: 10 August 2026, All HeroAI users on mobile)
Automations
Admins and IT managers can now build custom reports that combine employee and asset data in one place, making audits and offboarding workflows easier to manage. (Released: 10 August 2026, HR Admins and IT Managers with Asset Register and Custom Reports permission)
HR admins and finance teams can now report on leave liability values directly inside Custom Reports, helping them understand the financial value of leave balances without manual calculations outside the platform. (Released: 10 August 2026, HR Admins and Finance teams with leave and custom report permissions)
Core HR
Admins can now create and manage departments in Organisation Settings and assign workers to departments during onboarding, from profiles, or via CSV, improving workforce organisation and reporting. (Released: 11 August 2026, Global)
The Issues Summary Hub and Dashboard are now available to all supported regions, including Singapore. (Released: 11 August 2026, All sub-plans for Hub; HR Elite and Unlimited for Dashboard)
Recurring Compliance Task Distribution is now available across all regions, including Singapore, helping HR admins automate repeat compliance work. (Released: 11 August 2026, All sub-plans)
Workers can now open, read, and sign HR documents directly in the EH Work app on iOS and Android, removing the need to switch to desktop. (Released: 11 August 2026, Mobile-first and deskless workers)
HR Rostering & Timesheets
Sensitive leave details are now masked across key manager-facing web, mobile, and email surfaces, helping protect employee privacy while preserving approval workflows. (Released: 13 August 2026, Global)
The Unified Calendar is now publicly available for all customers, with added visibility of team schedules, blackout periods, contractors, and leave management actions. (Released: 13 August 2026, Global)
ITOps & Security
Users with Pay Details permissions can now manage employee portal access within their permitted scope, reducing the need to grant full admin rights for onboarding tasks. (Released: 11 August 2026, KeyPay-connected organisations using Custom Security Settings)
Payroll login audit logs now include device fingerprint IDs, giving organisations stronger visibility to help detect suspicious activity and potential account takeovers. (Released: 10 August 2026)
Users with Asset Register - Manage permission can now assign, return, and reassign assets across the whole organisation, including employees, contractors, and volunteers. (Released: 13 August 2026, Users with Asset Register - Manage permissions)
OpenAPI & Developer Experience
HR staff with the right platform permissions can now use the Member Delete and Tax Declaration endpoints without needing admin or owner credentials, making integrations easier to manage. (Released: 9 August 2026)
Builders can now upload supporting documents and attach them to leave requests through the API, enabling fully automated leave request workflows. (Released: 12 August 2026)
Payroll
Payroll admins can now include employee tags in Custom Reports, making it easier to build richer reporting outputs without workarounds. (Released: 12 August 2026, All users with access to custom reports)
Performance Management
Employees can now open Chat in a side panel from anywhere in the platform and start messages or give shout-outs directly from the Org Chart, making communication more seamless alongside daily work. (Released: 7 August 2026, Employment Unlimited plus Chat add-on customers)
Platform Experience
Admins can now delegate editing access to specific organisation email categories through Security Groups, reducing admin bottlenecks without exposing full admin access. (Released: 7 August 2026, All regions)
Daily summary emails can now be scheduled more flexibly based on organisation or employee timezones, with options to respect working hours and days off. (Released: 13 August 2026, Global)
Platform-generated emails now use employees’ preferred names by default, making automated communications more personal and respectful. (Released: 13 August 2026, All regions)
Recruitment
Recruitment teams can now bulk import up to 1,000 candidate CVs into the Talent Pool, reducing manual entry and making platform migrations faster. (Released: 13 August 2026, Users with talent pool access)
Rostering & Timesheets
Managers can now edit timesheet entries directly in the EH Work mobile app, allowing corrections to be made quickly without switching to desktop. (Released: 12 August 2026, Managers and admins using timesheet management)
Volunteers can now view shifts, swap shifts, and bid for open shifts in the EH Work app, giving them the same rostering experience as other workers. (Released: 10 August 2026, Organisations using rostering with work sites and positions)
Original source - Aug 6, 2026
- Date parsed from source:Aug 6, 2026
- First seen by Releasebot:Aug 6, 2026
From unchecked AI spend to complete control: How Rippling built AI Spend Console
Rippling launches AI Spend Console, giving CFOs and CTOs a clear view of AI spend, tying it to teams and business outcomes, and helping govern approved LLM use. It also offers permissioned dashboards and a free 30-day trial.
AI Spend Console
Today, we’re launching AI Spend Console. It gives CFOs and CTOs a clear view of AI spend, connects it to business outcomes, and governs the use of approved LLMs.
Unlike simple usage dashboards or point solutions, AI Spend Console ties AI spend to employee attributes, so you can understand which departments, teams, or roles are driving your AI bill. It also connects spend to key business metrics like performance ratings or pull request volume, so you can understand where token usage drives improved business outcomes.
Here’s the journey of why we built this product and how we got here.
AI token spend was growing 80% MoM
Like many tech companies, we were early to AI adoption. We turned on AI tools for all employees, and there were no limits. We encouraged experimentation. We hosted hackweeks, lunch and learns, and “ship shows”.
Very quickly, we saw a freight train of new expenses rolling our way. Our AI token spend was growing 80% MoM, and we were on a path to spend 40% of our R&D headcount budget on tokens.
At first, we didn't have the infrastructure to track, understand, and manage usage patterns and this new expense category. Our Finance team was manually collating data from multiple vendor dashboards and then running ad-hoc analyses. They could see total spend but not which teams or roles drove increases. More importantly, there was no way of connecting AI-related expenses to any measure of business impact.
We couldn’t answer questions like:
- Which models are used most frequently and by which teams?
- Which roles and levels are driving up our AI bill?
- How does AI spend per pull request differ between our top and bottom performers?
- Which engineers have high AI spend, whose peers frequently ask them to redo work in code reviews?
I'd seen a similar pattern before. In a previous role, I managed AWS infrastructure spend for one of the largest websites in the world. I knew exactly what unchecked cloud costs look like, and I knew this was going to get worse, so I started to tackle this problem in partnership with Catalina Zhao from our BizOps team. We quickly spun up a SWAT team of leaders from every department, including BizOps, HR, Product Sales, Engineering, Marketing, and more, to build our AI program at Rippling.
First, we did a “go and see”
One of our core values at Rippling is Go and See, so we grabbed time with our engineers, while diving into usage patterns (e.g. daily active users) and data on model costs, vendor spend, and usage patterns.
We worked with a few engineers to scrape this data directly into a centralized data lake, which was entirely manual and extremely time-intensive.
Here’s what we found:
- Concentration was extreme. Roughly 10–15% of our employees were driving about 60% of total AI spend. One engineer was spending $50,000 a month.
- Expensive defaults were the norm. The newest models were set to fast mode. That wasn’t because we made that decision internally but rather because nobody had ever looked into it and set best practices.
- The productivity signal was real, but not linear. Engineers heavily using AI tools like Cursor were shipping more PRs, but the biggest productivity improvements came from initial adoption, not from spending more on frontier models.
- Our engineering org needed to evolve. We saw which engineers were pushing the frontier of innovation with creative AI use cases, where those use cases stayed siloed instead of spreading org-wide, while identifying blockers to broader adoption.
- The trajectory was unsustainable. We built a model to forecast costs and discovered that we were on a path to spend 40% of our R&D headcount budget on AI tokens. The following year, we’d approach 90%.
To help control costs, we went into every AI provider and set a standard dollar amount per tool per month cap. It wasn't a permanent solution, but it gave us time to get our strategy in place.
Building our AI infrastructure
We needed clear visibility into token consumption, by whom and on what models, and then connect those costs to business metrics like code quality and number of PRs merged.
Step 1: Getting all the data in one place
We used our Data Cloud infrastructure to pull AI spend directly from our vendors (such as Cursor, OpenAI, and Anthropic) directly into Rippling.
When external data like token consumption gets ingested into Rippling, our software identifies fields that reference users: email addresses, employee IDs, usernames, and display names. It joins them to the corresponding Rippling identity profile, so that business users don’t have to configure those joins themselves. For example, a GitHub user name (coder3) gets mapped to the employee’s work email ([email protected]).
With Rippling’s data ingestion and mapping capabilities, we centralized our AI spend and usage data and mapped it to our built-in org context. A GitHub pull request is not treated as a flow row. It’s a record connected to an employee and attributes such as their team, role, or department. That means business data becomes easier to analyze, easier to govern, and easier to act on.
Step 2: Building dashboards
Now, with our AI spend and usage data in Rippling, we used Rippling AI’s ability to autonomously design and render dashboards based on any question, without any SQL work.
We started building dashboards to view weekly AI spend over time, model usage by teams, spend vs. GitHub PRs, spend vs. code rework, and more across our engineering team.
We created a dashboard for engineering known as the AI Scorecard. It connects data across Cursor, OpenAI suite (Codex), and Claude suite (Code) to highlight four key metrics:
- Adoption score (10 points): An employee’s rate of agentically prompting with a tool every day.
- Usage score (10 points): An employee's depth of engagement with AI tools.
- Productivity score (10 points): An employee’s output (PRs, lines of code).
- Cycle time (10 points): How long do the PRs take to merge?
- Efficiency score (7.5 points): Spend on AI vs. productivity.
All Rippling dashboards automatically obey the permissions inside of Rippling, so users can share dashboards scoped to each viewer. For example, an Engineering manager can see the dashboard as another manager can, but only scoped to their team.
Step 3: AI Gateway
Observing how much one person spends is only half the battle. Our team also needed a way to control it.
We built Rippling AI Gateway*: an internal routing layer that sits between our employees and approved models. All LLM traffic goes through it. This gives us one place to set and enforce spend limits and model access policies, route AI requests to the right models for the right job, and log every transaction.
It also means that we can implement new models without requiring the organization to retool their entire setup, implement routing logic, and keep security logs without vendor negotiations. Additionally, we can use our AI Gateway in our developer ecosystem to run agentic jobs and orchestrated workflows (such as Slackbots or JIRA ticket triage). Our tooling is no longer locked to any one vendor.
Step 4: AI captains
Then, we needed to fundamentally shift how we approached AI across the company, not just in R&D.
We stood up an AI Captains program. This is an internal team of Ripplers whose goal is to expand our use of AI intentionally in every Non-R&D org. They are the connective tissue between our company-wide AI direction and the day-to-day reality of each team. They help select the right tools for the right job, automate the highest value workflows, enable employees, and ensure that we link AI use cases to real ROI.
Each captain owns three things for their org:
- Impact: Building and validating AI solutions for their org tied to real ROI.
- Adoption: Enabling their org on the right AI tools.
- Governance: Maintaining platform hygiene, monitoring usage, reviewing and approving skills, and serving as Tier 1 support for AI issues.
20 AI Captains were nominated from across Rippling, and the results were significant. For R&D, we went from a forecast of spending 40% of our headcount budget on tokens to 10 to 15%. That’s tens of millions of dollars a year. And productivity continued to climb because constraints made engineers smarter, not less capable. We saw the same for other teams.
When employees had unlimited spend, they defaulted to the most expensive models to avoid any cognitive load. When they had a budget, they actually learned the tools. They figured out which models were good at what, which configurations were most efficient, which harnesses gave them the best results. The constraint created the innovation.
AI Spend Console: One place to track, understand, and control your AI spend
This work led us to productize our approach so other companies can see, understand, and control their AI spend too. With AI Spend Console, CFOs and CTOs can get a clear view of AI spend, connect it to business outcomes, and, soon, govern the use of approved LLMs.
Rippling AI generates permissioned dashboards across your connected data. You can even ask follow-up questions in natural language to drill down into spend and usage patterns or customize charts, without any SQL work.
AI Spend Console allows you to:
- Identify what’s driving AI spend. Break down costs by teams, roles, or departments.
- Understand the value of spend. Map AI spend to business metrics like performance ratings or pull request volume, so you can flag inefficient use.
- Control AI access and spend*. Enforce model access policies based on employee attributes, then automatically route AI requests to approved LLMs.
Starting today, you can try AI Spend Console for free with a 30 day trial. No Rippling subscription required.
A new era for AI token spend
AI isn’t just a line item. It's embedded in how every company works and how every product is built today. Just spending money on AI doesn’t mean anything. What matters is spending it intentionally.
Context is everything. Intentional spend starts with visibility. You need to see all your AI spend in one place, tied to the teams, roles, and departments driving it, and connected to the business outcomes it's producing. Without that org context, spend is just a number. Rippling AI Spend Console gives you all three.
We used it to go from zero visibility and a trajectory toward spending nearly half our R&D headcount budget on tokens, to a governed and measured AI program that’s making Rippling more productive than ever before.
If you’d like to try it out, you can get started here.
DISCLAIMER
Rippling and its affiliates do not provide tax, accounting, or legal advice. This material has been prepared for informational purposes only, and is not intended to provide or be relied on for tax, accounting, or legal advice. You should consult your own tax, accounting, and legal advisors before engaging in any related activities or transactions.
Join the Rippling AI Gateway waitlist.
Original source