HR is all about connection. You connect people to workflows, to their tools, and to each other.
At Rise, we know how important it is to keep that connection seamless.
So behind-the-scenes, our team has been working to make the Rise platform even better. Since March 2026, we’ve released over 40 new features and improvements.
And for September 2026, we’re excited to announce four big updates to help you connect to your work better, all within Rise. Now, you can:
- Connect Rise to any AI assistant you use
- Access your work on the go with the newly rebuilt mobile app
- Connect Rise products together, closer than ever
- Connect Rise to everything else.
Let’s take a look at each.
Connect Rise to any AI assistant you use
Nearly 60% of the Canadian HR professionals we surveyed for this year's State of HR report use AI every week, most often for analytics and reporting. But even though HR is using AI, many respondents told us that there still hasn’t been a formal company rollout.
Now, with Rise’s AI connectors, you can actively plan for one.
That’s right. Rise now connects to any AI assistant you use: Anthropic Claude, OpenAI ChatGPT, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and Google Gemini.
Your assistant works with your live Rise data, so you can ask who's off next month, check whether a bonus made it into the pay run, or hand over your exit letter template and get back a finished document with the employee's title, last day, and address already filled in.
Full permission controls. You authenticate as yourself, so your assistant sees exactly what you can see in Rise and nothing more. Change someone's permissions and the connection updates automatically. It's opt-in, and nothing about your data changes if you skip it.
We’re building AI superpowers for Canadian SMBs, and we’re not stopping here. So, what’s next?
- More AI capabilities for everyone, from administrators to managers and regular staff.
- More AI features inside the RIse platform, not just via external AI assistants.
Connect from anywhere with the brand new Rise mobile app
Meet the rebuilt Rise mobile app available on iOS and Android.
We rebuilt the app from the ground up using a brand new technical foundation and the same design language you know from the web platform. It loads up to 3x faster, errors and crashes have dropped by more than 90%, and you can switch between organizations without signing out.
That new foundation means we're able to make improvements to the mobile experience much faster now. We’re looking ahead to some more exciting mobile updates soon:
- A new clocking experience. Improved user experience and paid/unpaid break clocking.
- AI agents on mobile. Do all the same things you can do on the web
- Performance management, payroll approval from your phone… and more.
Connect Rise products together, closer than ever
Payroll-synced time off policies
Time Off now speaks Payroll’s language. Here are the key updates:
- Balances reflect what people actually earned, not an estimate — in hours and in dollars.
- Accruals per pay run, not just monthly or annually.
- Negative balance protection, so people can’t book time off before they’ve earned it.
- Built for variable hours: hourly, part-time, seasonal, multi-site. Compatible with restaurants, clinics, retail, and franchises.
New and improved employee onboarding
On Grow and Optimize plans, now under Directory, you can:
- Fill in custom fields, manager, and country and region up front instead of circling back later, and create a position without leaving the form.
- Give limited access to new hires before their start date
- New hire tasks are now available to complete ahead of time
- Fully integrated with document acknowledgements, document uploads, and more.
New carriers in Rise Health
Here’s why this is exciting:
- Keep the plan you have and add Rise on top, or move your benefits to us at renewal.
- Benefits, HR and payroll on one platform — life events and deductions sync themselves.
- Digital enrolment your people can finish in minutes
- Rise calculates premiums, remits to the carrier, and reconciles payroll automatically.
If your renewal is coming up, or you’re setting benefits up for the first time, talk to our Rise Health team today.
Connect Rise to everything else
If you sync Rise Payroll journal entries to Xero or QuickBooks Online, you now have classes and tracking categories alongside departmental mapping. We've also introduced percentage-based allocation splits and consolidated journal entries, where fifty separate hits to a clearing account now arrive as one clean entry.
No two businesses run the same stack, though. Which brings us to the big update.
Rise now has a public API. For the first time, you can read your Rise data and build whatever you need on top of it. Every client, every plan, no additional cost, no waitlist.
Interested in learning more? Just send your developer to developer.risepeople.com. In one month of early access, clients have already built an ERP journal entry integration, time off notifications in Slack, and a Power BI pipeline.
And for more info on all these updates, watch our webinar, It’s Time to Connect: Introducing the New Era of Rise on-demand.
