During our September 2026 product showcase, our product team walked viewers through everything that's changed since May – across the AI assistant, HR, payroll and the product roadmap. Here's the full roundup.
AI assistant: faster, more honest, and policies are here
Since May, the team has shipped roughly one AI assistant release per week, monitoring every conversation daily across 10 quality dimensions. Response times have dropped 43% on average, from around 42 seconds to 24 seconds.
The assistant is also more honest. Rather than fabricating answers when it doesn't know something, it now tells you clearly what it couldn't check or what's disabled on your system. Absence booking has been extended to handle flexi patterns, overnight shifts and part-day bookings – and the confirmation flow is more robust.
Policy Q&A
Policy Q&A rolled out to early adopters in mid-September. Employees can ask a policy question in plain language and get an answer drawn from their organisation's own uploaded documents – with the document name, version and page number cited so the answer can be checked, not just taken on trust.
During the showcase demo, product manager Martin Pyle showed the assistant answering a question about when a fit note is required for sickness absence – pulling the answer directly from the organisation's sickness absence policy and citing page four. The assistant can also cross-reference structured HR data alongside policy documents, so you can ask whether an employee's sickness record might trigger a formal procedure at the same time as finding the policy answer.
Further capabilities in development include version comparison (for example, you can ask what changed between two versions of a policy in plain language), in-conversation policy acceptance, and extension to company documents like handbooks and guides.
Coming next: "How do I" answers
Around 25% of all questions asked of the AI assistant are "how do I" questions. Currently the assistant handles these by surfacing a knowledge base search link, which takes users out of the system and breaks context. The next development brings those answers back inside the assistant, with citations and direct menu paths, so users can get the answer and act on it without switching tabs.
HR updates: integration, onboarding and quality of life improvements
Now live: HR and benefits integration
Our HR software and employee benefits platform integration is live. A real-time API sync between Ciphr HR and Ciphr benefits means employee changes – starters, leavers, salary updates, job title changes – flow across automatically. No manual exports, no delays.
The integration covers personal details, job information, benefit scheme assignment and more, with a full audit trail and a clear interface showing sync status for every employee record. Phase two, which will add holiday buy and sell functionality via the benefits platform, is on the roadmap.
Mobile onboarding
New starters who don't yet have access to a desktop or laptop can now complete onboarding via our mobile experience. Where links within onboarding take users to mobile-optimised pages – such as policy acceptance – they'll open in the mobile experience automatically.
Reporting performance
Large reports now go into a queue rather than making users wait on screen. Once a report is generated, users receive an email notification and can retrieve it from a new generated reports area – which also stores historic reports, removing the need to save them locally.
Holiday allowance warnings
Employees who submit holiday requests, and approvers who review requests, both now see a clear warning if a holiday request would take someone over their entitlement. The warning appears on both mobile and desktop, with a visual indicator on the approver's verification screen to draw attention to the specific request.
FTE salary field
A calculated FTE (full-time equivalent) salary field has been added to the job and pay area, showing full-time equivalent salary for employees on less than or more than one FTE. Adding this field to report designer is on the roadmap.
Case management configuration
The case management module now supports up to 40 text fields and 60 date fields for further information configuration – giving HR teams more flexibility to tailor the module to their specific processes.
Payroll updates: occupational parental pay and configurable reporting
Occupational parental pay
After a beta period, occupational parental pay is now live in our cloud payroll software. This feature supports maternity, paternity, adoption and neonatal pay schemes, configurable by frequency, department and length of service. Multiple schemes can run simultaneously, with rules that vary by grade or tenure. Statutory pay is automatically offset, and a projected payment schedule shows exactly what will appear on the payslip across the full duration of the absence.
Configurable reporting
Payroll reporting has been made significantly more configurable. Users can add extra columns – including personal details like title, middle name and gender – to reports including the new gross-to-net detail report and the payment elements report. Column order is adjustable and reports can be saved with custom configurations. Auditing functionality logs all changes within a pay run at employee and company level, with date-stamped entries and time-period filtering.
What's on the roadmap
Self-serve notifications
HR administrators will soon be able to create and manage their own notification rules directly in the system – without going through our service team. The feature includes a bank of around 40-50 standard notifications as a starting point, fully configurable with rules, recipients, subsets and scheduling. Targeted for all customers by end of Q4.
Self-serve data importer
A new import tool will allow customers to import data into key areas of the HR system themselves – personal details, jobs and pay, absences, code tables and more – with built-in validation that checks data against system setup before import. A revert function is also in development.
HR agentic AI: data quality agent
Also in development is an AI agent that monitors HR data continuously and flags issues at the point of entry rather than when they surface during payroll or reporting. The agent can be trained with organisation-specific rules: for example, if someone in a particular location is added with an unexpected working pattern or job classification, the agent flags it immediately and makes a recommendation. Over time, the agent will also prompt employees to review related fields when they update their own data – for example, checking whether beneficiary details need updating when emergency contact information changes.
HR-payroll integration: absences
The first phase of absence data flowing from HR into cloud payroll is in development, starting with full-day sickness. Further absence types will follow.
Payroll: rates and hours
Building the foundations for rates and hours in cloud payroll – hourly rates, working patterns and time-based pay elements – is actively in development.
Our webinar recording covers everything in this blog post – plus live demos you’ll get more out of by watching than reading about. Check out the broadcast here.
Not yet a Ciphr customer? Book a demo or download our brochure to find out more.