Rethinking Global Teams for the AI Era ft. Pragya Gupta and Amy Mosher, isolved

Ravi Darbha: Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Zinnov Podcast. I’m your host, Ravi Darbha, partner at Zinnov. Uh, I have two terrific guests with me today, Pragya Gupta, chief operating officer at isolved, and Amy Mosher, chief people officer at isolved. isolved is a 40-year-old HCM company. One in every 20 American workers run through their platform in some way, payroll, benefits, HR, infrastructure that has powered the American workforce for four decades.

And in 2026, for the first time, they’re planting a flag outside the US with a GCC in Hyderabad. So Amy and Pragya, really glad to have you both. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you.

Pragya Gupta: Thank you for having us.

Ravi Darbha: So Pragya, isolved is now opening its first GCC in India. Uh, why year one in 2026 and not 2016??

Pragya Gupta: Yeah, that’s a good question.

So if you think about, you know, we’ve been around for four decades, as you pointed out. In the last, um, I would say seven to eight years, we’ve had a tremendous amount of growth. We’ve grown 26%, uh, CAGR, compounded annual growth rate. So we’ve seen tremendous amount of growth, and now as we are growing more and more, um, what we are recognizing is that we need to be able to onboard talent way quicker than we’ve ever been.

Pragya Gupta: Um, should we have done that in 2016? Maybe, but we were not there, there at the time. Now we are here where we want. We’ve now grown to about 3,000 employees in the States. Uh, here we are almost, almost have hired about 300 employees, um, in less six, in less than six months that we’ve been here. So this amount, this scale of growth, um, we need…

We wanna be ready, uh, as, as we, uh, onboard new talent, as we bring on more customers, and that is why now is the best time.

Ravi Darbha: Got it. Speed to market is the mantra.

Pragya Gupta: Absolutely.

Ravi Darbha: Yes. Amy, you run people side of three private equity portfolio companies through scale. What’s different about standing up the center here in India compared to how you’ve grown these companies in the US?

Amy Mosher: I, I feel like the difference is that we live in a different time. There’s a different availability of talent, um, than there has ever been before. Um, more talent, more diverse talent, uh, especially in the Hyderabad area, and that’s the reason why we’ve really come here, uh, to begin with.

Ravi Darbha: This is a question for you both.

You, so you recently you had a change in your leadership, uh, with your CEO coming in, and he’s quite upfront about the AI ambition. How does the mandate shift for you both from technology and also the talent perspective?

Amy Mosher: So we’ve always had an ambition around leveraging AI. Uh, for us, uh, it transitions into more of a, uh, point of reference and, um, I feel like, uh, we will move faster, uh, as a result of his ambition in that area than we may have previously.

Amy Mosher: Uh, we have still maintained, I think, a terrific ambition and, and a scale to process from an AI perspective. Um, I’m very excited about his ambition, especially as it relates to the enablement of our employee base and leveraging AI to, uh, uh, scale that even further faster.

Pragya Gupta: Um, Michael Haske, who’s our CEO, he comes from a, a long-term HCM background.

Um, he’s been at many other HCM providers. Um, this is his third week, uh, in the organization, and I’m not kidding when I say we’ve talked about so many AI opportunities. We’ve talked about so, so many AI, uh, enabled products already. So I’m excited for this next, uh, chapter of growth. Not that we– uh, to Amy’s point, we were not thinking about AI any longer, but, uh, or earlier, but when you bring new, you know, fresh talent from the outside.

Pragya Gupta: In Michael’s last, uh, two companies, he was, uh, working with an AI, uh, product startup, so we j- he’s bringing in fresh ideas, and we are welcoming them. So it’ll be a– it’s, it’s a good, good time for us an, as an organization. We’ve onboarded great talent. We have great ambitions to marry the two.

Ravi Darbha: Uh, the mix of the GCC is R&D heavy with, uh, quite a bit of platform modernization and implementation.

Uh, a lot of GCCs typically start with execution lens, uh, and then eventually move towards a, a product-led R&D lens. You’ve sort of inverted that. What’s the strategy here?

Pragya Gupta: Um, so you know, at the onset when we started thinking about setting up a GCC in India, we didn’t want to be a company where all the, like, do all the fun, cool things here and then go send all the back office or the things that companies or teams don’t wanna do, send them to another location.

We don’t operate with that mindset. Uh, we, we weren’t operating with the mindset of, um, this is, you know, offshore or these are just our employees just in a different location. That’s how we think about our isolved India employees day one, and that is how we will always think of them. So it was never about, let’s send this work or that work.

Pragya Gupta: It was about how do we look at all our value streams and how do we grow all our value streams. And as part of that, um, to your point, some of the, the n- the projects that we’ve kicked off here, we have little to no teams in the States even for them. These are brand new, uh, uh, some of, some of them are brand new projects from an R&D perspective that we’ve embarked upon, um, because we truly believe, uh, in the talent and empowering the talent to deliver the value stream.

Pragya Gupta: It’s no longer you go just do bug fixes, you go do de- defect. The whole va- company operates in this value stream concept.

Ravi Darbha: And the strategy works really well because it helps longevity of their careers- Mm-hmm. Exactly … and works, uh, really well from a talent perspective.

Pragya Gupta: Exactly.

Ravi Darbha: So Amy, uh, building an agentic AI organization needs a slightly different DNA structure than building a pure play SaaS organization, right? So different roles, different kind of risk appetites, faster rapid cycles of development. What roles are you hiring in Hyderabad that will be complementing the US org to fulfill this need?

Amy Mosher: Well, I first wanna state that we really believe, to Pragya’s earlier point, that this is an office of equals.

Um, every function, we’re gonna leverage the talent that we can find locally and leverage them to the fullest of their ability. Uh, and so you can’t really differentiate between the roles that we’re going to staff here versus the ones that we’re gonna staff in the US. It’s re- it really is an office of equals, where we’re looking for an opportunistic approach to talent.

Amy Mosher: Um, and we do believe that there will be full stack development here. We feel that from, um, an AI perspective, we’ll find the right type of talent for our business and our business objectives, um, around transformation going forward here, as well as in the States and everywhere else that we end up having an office for isolved going forward.

Ravi Darbha: How does the quote, “Human in the loop,” translate into your org design, not just across the GCC, but also across the product organization?

Pragya Gupta: Yeah, that’s a, that’s a great question, and, uh, I’m sure all your viewers are talking about that in some shape or form, um, in every company. And, um, you know, as we’ve, we’ve now been on a path, especially in our development organization on this agentic, uh, development, agentic coding path, um, we’ve, we’re now thinking about how do we enable our senior software engineers, architects, to start building agents that can then…

I, I do my own coding, but then I build an agent and it g- goes and does, uh, 10 other things. So we are thinking a lot about that in our R&D organization, more like that human in the loop. But not just there, even in our support operations as an example. So we are an HR payroll organization. Um, we, we serve the SMB mid-market, which means that a lot of our– many, many of our customer base, they call us and will say, “Hey, this, this week Ravi worked five hours.

Pragya Gupta: Amy worked 20 hours. Pragya worked 30 hours.” Someone takes those hours down and goes process them, or they will just, uh, scrap, you know, scribble them on a piece of paper and turn that paper in. So now we have these agents, um, all AI, uh, uh, developed with agentic, uh, AI, but also agents, uh, that can run in the background and, uh, go process payroll.

But that is where human in the loop comes in because we process 200 billion in payroll every year as an organization. We cannot relinquish it to the agents, just not yet. Maybe in a few years. We’re not just that- … you know, comfortable yet. So we now have workflows and approvals built in where agents process these payroll agents, they process payroll, and then a human goes in and validates, yes, this is what a human would have done, and goes in and finishes that.

Pragya Gupta: Now, will we, uh, a- as, you know, as we get confidence, there is a confidence monitor built in. As we get that confidence, may- we may get to a point where we’re like, “Yep, this is good enough. Let a hum- a- agent pro- process it.” Until we get to that point, this is the mindset that we are enriching across the organization.

Ravi Darbha: How does this translate to performance management of the talent in this agentic world?

Amy Mosher: It, it translates directly, I feel. Um, not only do you have sol- more solid metrics, um, and quantitative metrics that you can look after when you have some processes like this in place, but you also have a way of measuring that that is more- Yeah quantitative. Um, you have a more direct line of feedback as a result, and I feel that you can manage performance even more, um, astutely and directly, um, with your employee base. And you’ll– They also have a tremendous amount of opportunity, um, around this for additional, uh, enablement resources that they may not have had previously, and more consistency in those, um, in the application of those, for sure.

Ravi Darbha: So Pragya, most GCCs fail at the second handoff, uh, when the work moves from project execution to sort of product ownership. How are you architecting the governance structure within the GCC to ensure this operates very closely with HQ from day one?

Pragya Gupta: Yeah. And you know, to your earlier question, we came, came to it from the, uh, concept of value engineering, value driven engineering, value stream mapping, and not just send the work that maybe no one wants to do in the States, send that work over.

So, so that was, you know, the hat we put on day one. When Amy and I, we made a visit, um, back in August, that was like a level setting we did. Who do we wanna be? And as Amy said, we wanted to create this office of equals. So with that background from in year one, I, um, I knock on wood here- … but I think our year two transition should not pull us back.

Pragya Gupta: Yeah. If anything, it should propel us forward. Uh, but, but to answer your question directly, especially about metrics, um, so the way we operate, um, our, our organization, and I’m gonna give some examples. Like in our R&D organization, we use DevEx or developer experience. We use flow metrics. That’s no different here.

What will be different is we are going to be doing geography-based metric. So if a team in India is producing this much, how is the team in India, in the US producing? But again, in engineering, you cannot compare one team’s velocity to the other team’s velocity. That is why we are outcome driven. We are not so much, okay, how many, you know, p- p- uh, pebbles did you move today, but rather what outcome did you produce?

Pragya Gupta: And we compare teams outcome by outcome. But as part of that, our metrics are consistent across all geographies. So that’s an R&D example. But then some of, in our, say in our back office op- some of our back office teams, uh, we look at how many, uh, cases you are closing or what kind of, uh, you know, processing, uh, uh, ca- functions you are doing.

But that is again consistent, uh, here as well as States. I think that’s the key for us is, uh, looking at metrics that are consistent across all our, uh, uh, workforce.

Ravi Darbha: Absolutely. And that outcome-oriented thinking is essentially going to get you to the AI augmented development- Exactly … much faster. Exactly.

Because I think for rapid prototypes and rapid cycles of development, value centric lens is going to be the key to enable prioritization and decision-making.

Pragya Gupta: Absolutely. And you know, um, y- last week, um, our site head and I were talking about this. Um, we want to do an agentic AI training for all our employee population here, no different than what we are talking about in the States as well.

[00:13:52] Pragya Gupta: All leaders need to be thinking through that. So the most important thing for me is that every location feels the most empowered and measuring themselves to the same goals as anywhere else, right? As a company, we have the same goals, right?

Ravi Darbha: Uh, Amy, attrition in Hyderabad GCCs in the engineering product space is running high right now. And I think that’s common across India a lot of the times, uh, especially in the AI roles and, you know, deep tech full stack development roles. What’s the retention thesis that is in compensation?

Amy Mosher: That isn’t compensation. Well, I, I don’t feel that it ever is truly just compensation. Right. Uh, I think that, uh, allows us to really think about the employee experience holistically, but also the individual’s experience and what they’re looking for.

I think there’s a lot of businesses, um, often that open GCCs that, uh, may be naive to thinking about individuals as, as truly having their own journey, um, and needing to speak with them about their individual journey and where they’re, where they’re coming from, and helping to fill the gaps that they’re looking for.

Amy Mosher: Um, I think even having those conversations is a retention, uh, component that we utilize for that. Uh, but overall, we really think about the holistic employee experience, not just how much they’re making, but, um, how do they feel at work? What are, are they doing things that they enjoy doing? Um, are they, uh, do they understand the bigger picture in what we’re trying to achieve here?

Uh, and, uh, are we able to, um, be empathetic to their situations, um, and understand where they’re coming from, even from a personal perspective, and how that fits into their ability to do their best work? Um, I feel like if you think of this really in that scope, it’s a much bigger scope, um, a- and it’s also much smaller scope for, for certain individuals.

Amy Mosher: If you can do that, and you can do it well, um, you’re not going to worry so much about retention. I have to tell you that we have an excellent retention rate so far at R&D with this particular GCC, and I plan on keeping it that way. I really feel like, um, there are a lot of great people here who really, um, are driven to find an excellent and outstanding employee experience for these teams.

And, uh, I feel that if people are honest and forthcoming about what it is that they need, uh, we will be able to, um, meet the brief. Uh, and I feel very confident about that. So, uh, I’m not worried about attrition right now. I think I’m, I’m more worried about getting these employees up to speed and helping them to, to meet their own potential, and I feel like that’s a self-motivating factor for a lot of individuals, especially in the R&D space.

Amy Mosher: And, uh, and it will, uh, meet, uh, the challenge of, of retention in the future.

Ravi Darbha: Uh, extending that question, Hyderabad is full of enterprise GCCs. Uh, talent is trained to deal with, uh, large scaled up organizations. Your domain and your customer demographic is quite differentiated in that sense. Do you think this is a mismatch or an advantage, uh, you guys being here?

Pragya Gupta: Um, you know, uh, uh, our… So our product, for your listeners, we, we are an HR payroll organization, and we serve in the US, so we, we do not have a… Like, we do not run global payroll. Yeah. Uh, we partner, uh, in, in the market for that, but we are pretty much US-centric. Now, in the US, if you think about it, America runs on small businesses. Mm. Right?

Small and mid-sized businesses. So that’s our ethos, right? And, um, we are proud of that heritage, we are proud of the roots, and we scale extremely well there, right? Within our organization, we have 3,000 employees, so we are not as much as, you know, ourselves, we are more of a big organization, right? Um, so when that scale happens, we have 200,000 customers, as you, you pointed out, we serve 9 million employees.

Pragya Gupta: At that scale, we have to have a lot of practices that enable us to operate faster and better. Um, so I think that’s what everyone needs to understand, that we serve small and mid bus- mid-sized businesses, but at the same time, our practices and our, uh, operating, uh, paradigms have to scale to be able to support this many number of customers.

Right? So I don’t know if I answered your question. Yes. But that is a bit different- Yes … mindset, right? We are not a 30 employee company. Yeah. We are pretty big- Exactly … for what we do. Did you… Does that… Do you agree?

Amy Mosher: I think that, I think that works.

Pragya Gupta: Yeah

Amy Mosher: I… Unless you were trying to get to from a talent perspective- Yes

Amy Mosher: or how we would differentiate- Absolutely … or between companies that are servicing enterprise clients, and we’re more of a small market play. I, I feel like an answer may be that we are not gonna compromise on our white glove service, and we believe that we can obtain that here, and that is a differentiator for us in the type of talent that we’re attracting to, to isolved here in Hyderabad.

Amy Mosher: Uh, and I mean, we’re not, we’re not branded as a call center. This truly is an office of equals, and I feel like that as a differentiator that speaks to the population in a very positive way, um, and will provide the right level of training and enablement. I keep getting back to that, but the right level of training to ensure that our employees understand the importance of providing a very, very high level of service, which many individuals in many other enterprise type companies never have the opportunity to, to realize.

Amy Mosher: So that, that could be a true differentiator for us in the market. Um, and we are a different, a bit of a different player because of that.

Pragya Gupta: And if, and if I can add one thing, which is extending to what Amy is saying. You know, if our roots are service, right? We are … A lot of H- HR, HCM players tend to believe they are SaaS organizations.

They might be, but service first, right? That is why people pick us. That’s our … That’s really important to us. That’s really important to our customers. So that’s one. Now, how does great service get created, right? And everyone wants to do that, but there is a very simple recipe to that, and I think that runs in the ethos or the DNA of our organization.

Pragya Gupta: You create a great culture, your people do the best service. When you do the best service, that insulates the product, and that’s what creates a great organization, right? Take care of your people, they take care of the … Or you know, they take care of customers, customers take care of the business. That’s a simple model, simple recipe, and that model is no different than what we are bringing here.

Pragya Gupta: So yes, I, I understand what you’re saying that some s- the talent pool here may be like, “Oh, I wanna work for a bigger name, a bigger brand, some enterprise brands.” But in, at the end of it, we have so, such high, uh, tenure in the States, and that’s because when, when employees feel that they can do their best work, they are growing, you know, they are becoming the best version of themselves, they want to stay.

That’s what we are bringing here, and over time we are going to fi-find, and I hope that is the talent pool we have right now, but over time we are gonna s- find the talent pool that will stay for those things, right? You may come for those things, but will you stay for those things? That’s what we want to build.

Ravi Darbha: Yeah. And, and I think if I think about the white glove service combined with that product ownership- Right. Mm-hmm … we’re actually at the right place- Mm-hmm … uh, to attract the best in class talent for that. Mm-hmm. Pragya, is the market ready for AI first HR applications, especially when there are gaps in AI ethics, compliance, and performance monitoring?

[00:21:19] Ravi Darbha: What is isolved’s approach to, you know, the product, the platform, and especially the customer service associated with it, uh, for this industry-wide adoption?

[00:21:30] Pragya Gupta: Yeah, absolutely. That’s a great question. Um, you know, I, I’ll break it down into multiple parts. Let’s first talk about AI in products and, uh, as you know, the, the, the way search has changed, right?

[00:21:45] Pragya Gupta: Uh, users used to go to Google for, for finding all sorts of information. Now, so many users don’t go to Google, they directly go to an LLM, right? Uh, it is becoming… LLMs are now in our flow of work, right? You pick your poison, Gemini, uh, uh, ChatGPT, Claude, whatever you want to pick, but that’s where employees live.

[00:22:06] Pragya Gupta: So what we are thinking about is how do we create product solutions in that flow of work? So that’s, that’s one, right? The second part of it is, so there is… That’s generative AI, but there’s also our traditional machine learning models, and every, any time we’ve rolled something out, um, we take a very ethics-oriented approach.

[00:22:26] Pragya Gupta: Um, we, uh, absolutely filter all sorts of demographic information. So for instance, uh, we, we- if we offer candidate matching, right? Match the best candidates with the best jobs, then we have the, the models have no idea of your demographics, so there is no bias in the models. So we take that AI and ethical approach really seriously.

[00:22:48] Pragya Gupta: So that’s one part of it. The second part of it is, as I was saying earlier, which is how do, how does, how do all the functions become super fast or super efficient, not fast, su- super efficient? Um, and then we make the av- availability of information to our user base, whether that’s the employee user base or the admin user base, like people who are actually running, uh, HR applications.

[00:23:13] Pragya Gupta: How do we enable them to find information, uh, more intuitively, way faster? So, so when we think of AI, we think of AI in all these aspects as we roll out products and services.

Ravi Darbha: Uh, Amy, you’re the CPO of the HCM company that sells HR software. When you use your own product, especially with the Hyderabad employees, what are you learning that’s changing the product?

Amy Mosher: There’s a lot of new AI capability I’m very excited about. Uh, there’s a lot that we’ve already done, but I cannot tell you how excited I am for the next iteration here from a transformational perspective for us, for this product. Uh, we utilize all of our own software- … um, to grow and, and support our own business.

Pragya Gupta: We call Amy our customer zero.

Amy Mosher: Yeah. I think of it as a pleasure- Yeah … honestly, to have the opportunity to be a part of the product development as well as the utilization of this product, um, but especially, um, what I’m seeing from an AI perspective. There’s so… Historically, small and mid-market HR practitioners, um, are understaffed, and oftentimes don’t always have the varied skill set that they need to be, um, the most strategic for their, for their operations and for their businesses.

Amy Mosher: And our ability to utilize AI in our own product base just to make the product simpler for them to use, um, to, uh, allow a, a higher level of self-service, um, to their employees, to, um, streamline processes and workflow, uh, allowing them to have more time to do what they should be doing, which is, um, prioritizing the, the people interaction and experience, um, I feel like is a, is a tremendous opportunity for us, and we utilize those ourselves internally, and it’s made us better, faster, stronger.

And, and I love to talk to our clients about that as well, and our prospects about that as well. Um, I think it makes us very special in the HCM space in general, um, but there aren’t a lot of companies, SaaS software businesses out there that actually utilize their own technology. So I think it also brings a different layer to the culture of our organization, um, to be able to utilize our own, uh, our own products, um, and services internally.

Amy Mosher: Um, and it internalizes, uh, the experience, and so you get this empathy from, from your service base, for example, or your product, um, teams, or your R&D teams, um, because they’re using the product every day as well.

Ravi Darbha: So in the terminology of dogfooding- Yeah. … are you customer zero or patient zero?

Pragya Gupta: We’re, we’re… No, we’re drinking our own champagne.

Pragya Gupta: We’re, we’re…

Amy Mosher: Right.

Ravi Darbha: Neither. That’s one way of putting it. Yes. Excellent. Thank you for the amazing insights, and I think we are done with most of the questions. We are now into the exciting part of the segment, which is the rapid fire round.

Pragya Gupta: This is like Koffee with Karan. Yeah. Is there a hamper?

Ravi Darbha: Not necessarily a hamper, but we do have some gifts. Oh, yes. Not at the, the scale and the expense of-

Pragya Gupta: Uh, is this a competition? Is it?…

Amy Mosher: I defer.

Ravi Darbha: So there are no winners in this.

Pragya Gupta: Okay. All right. Yeah.

Ravi Darbha: So for Pragya- Yeah … I’m gonna ask you five sets of questions, uh, whatever comes to your mind first. Uh, build versus buy, your default?

Pragya Gupta: M- I, I put it into three categories, build, buy or partner, and we make those decisions as it comes.

So there is no default. We do an extensive business case analysis and pick out the best, uh, path for us.

Ravi Darbha: One capability you are excited about building in your product?

Pragya Gupta: Um, we wanna be where our users are. So as I mentioned, flow of, flow of work, where if they are in ChatGPT, if they are in Claude, if they are in, uh, Gemini, we wanna be in the flow of work for them.

Ravi Darbha: Okay. Is product development art or science? And this is a controversial question.

Pragya Gupta: Yeah. Oh. This is such a controversial question. I think, um, so I, uh, have, uh, spent my time in both product as well as engineering. Engineering is science, product is art. But like I always tell my product and engineering leaders, you are two parts of the body.

Pragya Gupta: Yeah. No part of the body can be healthy without the other. So an art without science cannot develop something that’s really cool, and science without art is not intuitive, so I think it’s both. Yeah, it’s- Which I did not answer your question- … but it’s both.

Ravi Darbha: It’s like right brain and left brain.

Pragya Gupta: Yeah. Both are needed.

Pragya Gupta: Right brain, left brain, exactly.

Ravi Darbha: First thing you do when you land in Hyderabad?

Pragya Gupta: Um, I think I would say I come to the Zinnov office every time, but we’ve– you guys have become such good partners for us, so we’re here every time we’re here, so yeah.

Ravi Darbha: Thank you for that. One word to describe the India tech talent pool.

Pragya Gupta: Growing.

Ravi Darbha: Amy, your turn now.

Amy Mosher: Okay. Yeah. Give them to me.

Ravi Darbha: The hiring red flag you’ll never ignore.

Amy Mosher: Um, a lack of personality. As you can see, we have a lot of- Yes … that going on here, so.

Ravi Darbha: Absolutely. Mine would be dark humor.

Amy Mosher: Would… I love that for you, Ravi.

Ravi Darbha: Most underrated quality in a great hire?

Amy Mosher: Resilience.

Ravi Darbha: The last time an employee surprised you in the best possible way?

Amy Mosher: In the best possible way? Uh, they’re always surprising me, I have to tell you. Um, I, uh, I hesitate to, to use this person’s name, because they really went above and beyond, but for me, um, people’s ability to just move and shift priorities is incredible. Um, and they surprise me every time with that, and it comes back to resilience, I think.

[00:28:44] Amy Mosher: Um, a particular individual the other day just said, “You know, we’re gonna work this problem out.” And, um, I would say a year ago, that person probably wouldn’t have, have been so optimistic, but learning how to change and move and pivot, they really came to the table with some solutions quickly, and I couldn’t…

Amy Mosher: I, I was surprised by that.

Ravi Darbha: Awesome. Thank you. Thank you both, Amy and Pragya. It was a fabulous conversation. I really enjoyed this.

Pragya Gupta: We did, too. Thank

Ravi Darbha: you. And, uh, hope it was not as excruciating as you hoped it would be.

Pragya Gupta: No, of course not. No. We had a lovely time. Thank you for having us.

Ravi Darbha: Yes, thank you so much.

Ravi Darbha: Thank you to our audience for tuning in. Uh, stay tuned for more such global insights on the Zinnov Podcast.

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