An exclusive interview with The People Management magazine, Subramanyam S, Founder, President & CEO of Ascent HR Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

In an exclusive interview with The People Management magazine, Subramanyam S, Founder, President & CEO of Ascent HR Technologies Pvt. Ltd., shared insights on the benefits of StoHRM, a cloud-based HCM solution, for corporates. He also explained the implications of the recently implemented new Labour Codes for both employees and employers.

StoHRM is a cloud-based Human Capital Management (HCM) solution from hiring to separation. What are the key benefits for Corporations?

StoHRM brings discipline, visibility, and intelligence into the people engine of an organisation. It unifies hiring, workforce management, payroll, and exits into one coherent platform—removing fragmentation and fixing the “white spaces” where most risks and inefficiencies live.

Corporations benefit through:

• A single source of truth for workforce decisions.
• Process reliability at scale, with compliance embedded in every step.
• A productivity lift across HR and business managers, because routine work becomes automated.
• Sharper decisions, powered by analytics that highlight risks, gaps, and opportunities.
• A consistent employee experience, which is now essential for employer brand and retention.

Ultimately, StoHRM enables organisations to run people operations with the same rigour they expect in finance or supply chain.

Q2. What is the future of hiring in India in the world of AI? What is your advice to Hiring Directors?

Hiring in India will shift from being reactive and transactional to predictive, skills-driven, and deeply data-assisted. AI will not replace recruiters—it will remove the grunt work so they can focus on judgement, relationships, and organisational fit.

My advice to Hiring Directors:

• Adopt AI early—resume screening, sourcing, assessments, and interview insights will soon be standard.
• Invest in skills intelligence, not just CV keywords; the war for skills will define the next decade.
• Strengthen governance—AI needs design, review, and guardrails to avoid bias.
• Build hiring teams that can work with AI, not around it.

The organisations that modernise their hiring processes now will pull ahead in terms of speed, quality, and cost of talent acquisition.

Q3. India recently implemented new Labour Codes effective November 2025. What do the new labour codes mean for employees as well as employers?

The new Labour Codes represent India’s move toward simplification, formalisation, and transparency in the workplace.

For employees, this means:

• • Greater social security, more predictable benefits, and stronger safeguards.
  • Clarity on wages and entitlements, reducing disputes and ambiguity

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For employers, this is about:

• Re-engineering HR and payroll processes to align with the new definitions, computations, and compliance cycles.
• A higher standard of governance, especially around wages, working hours, and documentation.
• The need for technology-led compliance, because manual processes won’t cope with the new reporting intensity.

The companies that respond proactively—not just legally but strategically—will build trust and reduce long-term compliance costs.

Q4. What are the risks HR is facing from AI? What advice would you give HR Leaders?

AI is transforming HR more rapidly than any other function anticipated. The risks are real—bias, over-automation, data security, skill gaps, and loss of the human element. But the bigger risk is denial: HR cannot sit out the AI wave.

My advice to HR Leaders:

• • Build AI literacy in your teams—it’s now a core HR competency.

• Implement strong governance around data, privacy, and model behaviour.
• Use AI to elevate—not replace—human judgement, especially in sensitive processes.
• Start small, scale responsibly—pilots, sandboxes, and clear ROI paths.
• Stay anchored to ethics; responsible AI is quickly becoming a board-level expectation.

HR’s role is shifting from being a process custodian to being an architect of the organisation’s digital workforce strategy.