Bengaluru, India – Workforce management company Rippling has opened an AI Lab in Bengaluru as part of an expansion of its engineering operations in India and wider investment in artificial intelligence.
The AI Lab is based at Rippling’s Embassy Tech Village campus and will focus on research and engineering work supporting the company’s AI platform. Bengaluru is Rippling’s largest engineering hub outside its San Francisco headquarters.
The team is developing core components of the AI platform, including infrastructure, evaluation frameworks, sandboxing, scaling and latency optimisation. These capabilities are intended to support AI features across Rippling’s workforce management products.
AI development built around company data
Rippling said the AI Lab’s work builds on systems it has developed over the past decade, including its Employee Graph. The system models information such as employee identities, reporting structures, governance, permissions and company policies.
The company has developed its payroll, finance, benefits, compliance and IT management products around the Employee Graph, allowing its products to use a shared data model. Rippling said this enables its AI systems to access real-time information about an organisation’s people, finances and policies while operating within existing permissions and audit trails.
The company gave employee onboarding as an example, saying Rippling AI can handle processes such as applying relevant tax rules, provisioning account access, shipping devices, enrolling employees in benefits and routing approvals to the appropriate stakeholders.
India workforce expansion
The AI Lab forms part of Rippling’s broader investment in India, where it established operations in 2017. The company now has nearly 2,500 employees in the country and plans to increase its workforce.
Rippling is also expanding its presence at Embassy Tech Village, taking its total workspace to 170,000 sq ft. Sonia Parandekar, Senior Vice President of Engineering and India Site Lead, is overseeing the growth.
“Our goal has been to build an engineering organisation in India with ownership of some of Rippling’s most important technical challenges,” said Sonia Parandekar, Senior Vice President of Engineering and India Site Lead.
“The AI Lab is a natural next step, giving engineers here the opportunity to solve ambitious technical problems and build AI products that will have an impact for customers around the world,” Parandekar continued.
