Conference write-up
01
Zellis Connect ran on 23 September at Kings Place, London, for senior HR and payroll leaders across the UK and Ireland. It was the same day and the same city as MHR's World of Work.
For three scans before the event Zellis had named no product. Its only pre-event item was the 7 September announcement of Ravin Jesuthasan as headline speaker. On the day it named one and shipped it: Zellis Intelligent Assistant, available through Microsoft Copilot, reachable from Zellis's own platform and from Copilot, Teams and Outlook, delivered as an upgrade with no implementation project.
02
Every commitment made with a stated date, and whether it landed. This is the part no vendor publishes about itself.
03
Each was published at the time, on its own date. This write-up adds the synthesis, not the facts.
05
It writes. The assistant approves leave, amends contracts and adjusts pay, not only answers questions, and it does so from inside Microsoft's applications. At the time it was the furthest write surface on record for a UK payroll vendor. Comparable connectors either read only or confine writes to starting a workflow the vendor controls.
The governance is described in detail, and it is permission governance. Requests go over the Model Context Protocol and are authenticated against each user's existing Zellis permissions. "Security is inherited rather than recreated," and every interaction is logged. Customers switch capabilities on one at a time, so pay adjustment can be left off. What it does not describe is correctness. A wrong pay adjustment is a silent failure. It turns up as a payslip query weeks later rather than as an error in a log, and the release gives no figure for how often the assistant gets one wrong.
06
MHR used the same afternoon to describe an updated platform available "globally from April 2027" (see `mhr-wow-2026`). A buyer comparing the two UK platforms this quarter is choosing between something running now and something described now, with two tax-year-ends between them.
07
No follow-up release from Zellis between 24 and 30 September, and no registered trade outlet wrote the conference up in the seven days after it. The vendor's release is the only account on record, so nothing here has been independently assessed.
08
One, and it landed on the day. Zellis made no dated forward commitment at the event. Watch for any accuracy figure, any customer count for pay adjustment switched on, and any third UK vendor putting a write surface inside Copilot.
About this page. Announcements are recorded in the vendor's own words on the day they are made, and each commitment is re-checked against what actually arrives. Where a date was promised, this page will say whether it was met.