Gloat Agentic HR — How to Add AI Agents Without Replacing Your HRIS

Most HR-AI conversations in 2026 are still stuck in 2024 — a debate over whether to replace the core HRIS with an AI-native suite. The answer for almost every UK enterprise is no: you've spent three years and seven figures implementing Workday, Oracle HCM, or SAP SuccessFactors, and ripping it out for an unproven AI-native vendor is a CFO non-starter.

Gloat has spent the last five years building the alternative answer: a skills intelligence and talent marketplace platform that sits on top of the HRIS, inherits its business rules and security, and adds the agentic layer your existing system can't. The March 2026 Gloat Agentic HR release is the cleanest expression of that pattern, and it's worth understanding even if you've previously dismissed Gloat as a "talent marketplace" tool.

What Gloat Agentic HR is

Three things bundled into a single platform release:

A skills graph. Gloat's unified skills ontology spans tens of millions of profiles and standardises across job titles, industries, and geographies. This is the substrate everything else runs on — without a clean skills graph, agentic HR is just a chatbot wrapper.

Internal talent marketplace. Employees see open projects, gigs, and roles matched to their skills; managers see the inverse. This was Gloat's original product and is now table stakes for large-enterprise mobility programmes.

Agentic HR layer. The new bit. Pre-built agents for performance management, mobility recommendations, succession planning, learning paths, and reskilling, deployable inside Microsoft Copilot, Teams, Slack, and the customer's existing HRIS UI. Each agent inherits the HRIS's security model — meaning the agent can't see what the underlying system says the user can't see.

The architecture matters more than the features

The architectural call Gloat made — "we sit on top, we don't replace" — is what makes the platform a serious procurement candidate for large UK enterprises. The implementation reality:

• The agents run on Gloat infrastructure but query Workday/Oracle/SuccessFactors as the system of record
• No HRIS data migration; no parallel system of record; no risk of drift between Gloat and the HRIS
• Authentication, authorisation, and audit live in the HRIS; Gloat agents respect those boundaries
• Configuration changes in the HRIS (org changes, role definitions, comp bands) flow through automatically

This is the model most HRIS vendors are slowly adopting themselves — Workday Sana, Oracle AI Agent Studio — but Gloat is currently the most mature third-party expression of it.

How it compares

The procurement question that matters: do you have a single-HRIS estate or a multi-HRIS estate? Most large UK enterprises have at least two — typically a primary HRIS plus a regional or acquired-business secondary. Gloat is the cleanest answer for that reality. Workday Sana is the right answer if you're Workday-everywhere.

What it costs

Gloat is enterprise-priced and doesn't publish rates. Mid-market deployments tend to land in the £150,000–£400,000/year range; large enterprise deployments can reach seven figures depending on user count, agent breadth, and integration scope. That's roughly comparable to a top-tier Workday module add-on at similar user counts.

The procurement comparison most UK HRDs should run: cost of Gloat vs. cost of building agentic HR capabilities natively in Workday + Microsoft Copilot. Build-vs-buy maths usually tips toward buy here because the skills graph alone is a multi-year project to build internally.

Who should be looking at this now

• Large UK enterprises with a Workday/Oracle/SuccessFactors estate and a 2026 mandate for AI in HR
• Multi-HRIS estates post-acquisition or operating across geographies
• Companies with serious internal mobility programmes — Gloat is the most mature platform in the category
• HR functions reporting to a board with AI-progress KPIs — this is the procurement framing that gets it bought

Who shouldn't

• Mid-market companies under 5,000 employees — wrong category, look at HiBob or BambooHR
• Workday-everywhere shops with no acquisition complexity — Sana from Workday is probably enough
• HR functions without skills-data discipline — Gloat is an amplifier, and skills-data hygiene is a prerequisite

What to ask in the demo

Three questions that separate the substance from the keynote:

1. Show me the agent inheriting an HRIS permission boundary in real time. This is the architectural claim; make Gloat prove it on stage.

2. What does configuration drift between Gloat and the HRIS look like? Specifically: comp band changes, manager hierarchy changes, role taxonomy changes.

3. What's the rollout sequence and the people-ops change-management cost? This will be 2-3x the licence cost in the first year and is rarely budgeted.

For the broader HR & recruitment landscape, browse the HR & recruitment category or read our review of Eightfold AI.