Payworks’ Vidur Krishan speaks at Product-Led Summit Toronto on payroll for the agentic era

Vidur Krishan, Vice President, Product Management at Payworks, will deliver a session on building AI-first payroll and join a panel on AI governance at Product-Led Summit Toronto on Nov. 13. Payworks, a Canadian payroll, HR, and workforce management company serving more than 40,000 businesses across Canada, is also exhibiting at HRFest Canada for the first time, Nov. 10 and 11 at Rebel in Toronto.

Many organizations are adding AI features to products designed long before AI agents existed. In payroll and HR, where an error can mean a missed paycheque or a compliance breach, Vidur Krishan, who prefers to be called VK, suggests that approach creates more risk than value. His session makes the case for rebuilding established products as AI-first systems from the ground up, while protecting the reliability, compliance, and customer trust that regulated industries depend on.

"Most teams are trying to bolt AI onto products built for a different era," said VK. "AI finally lets us ask a sharper question: if we were solving this from scratch today, what would we build? In regulated areas like payroll and HR, the answer isn't a fully autonomous system. It's human-approved automation that removes the busywork and sharpens the decisions only a person should make. That's where Canadian product builders have a real opportunity to lead."

VK's sessions on Friday, Nov. 13:

• Keynote, 9:15 a.m. ET: Avoiding the AI bolt-on trap: Building payroll for the agentic era. Why adding AI to legacy systems backfires, how product teams are redesigning architecture for AI-native workflows, and how to balance speed with trust, compliance, and operational stability.
• Panel, 10:45 a.m. ET: Governance without killing innovation. How product leaders are moving from gatekeeping to built-in guardrails, and how regulation can become a competitive advantage rather than a brake.

At Payworks, VK leads product strategy, design, product operations, and go-to-market, and is helping guide the company's transformation into an AI-first business by embedding agentic AI into compliance-critical workflows. His expertise includes more than a decade of product leadership and spans AI transformation, product operating models, and regulatory technology.

The session draws on Payworks' own recent product and feature releases across its all-in-one payroll, HR, and workforce management solution, each designed to solve a specific challenge for the people who use them. Analytics Pro adds custom analyses, reusable filters, and side-by-side data comparisons to Payworks Workforce Analytics, making it easy for HR and finance teams to answer their own workforce questions without rebuilding reports from scratch or exporting data into spreadsheets. Payroll hub and firm management features give accountants, bookkeepers, and administrators one simple view to manage multiple client accounts and team access within the Payworks application. That cuts down on switching between logins and helps firms stay secure and compliant by controlling who can see and do what across a growing client base. Labour cost data shows Payworks Time Management clients worked hours and worked dollars together by cost centre, department, and labour option, giving managers a reliable picture of where labour spend is going so they can spot overruns, plan staffing, and budget with confidence.

At HRFest Canada, HR professionals can visit the Payworks booth to learn more about the integrated suite of payroll and HR solutions, including Analytics built directly into the HR solutions to move from reporting on your workforce to advising the business with built in visibility into headcount, turnover, tenure, and demographics.

To learn more about Payworks, visit payworks.ca.