Auckland,
New Zealand – 22 April 2026 – A new employment
model enabling businesses to hire, employ, and manage staff
is designed to overcome New Zealand’s complex and costly
compliance landscape, especially for small and medium
businesses.
Employment Hero’s AI-powered platform
HeroForce launched today in New Zealand as part of a global
rollout across Australia, Canada and the UK, targeting what
the company estimates to be $12 billion(1) in duplicate
employment administration costs to businesses.
New
Zealand businesses face one of the most cumbersome
compliance landscapes in the world, with issues surrounding
the Holidays Act alone triggering hundreds of millions of
dollars in remediation over the past decade. The kicker:
generally, businesses manage compliance individually and
largely manually, which adds significant cost.
But
now, Employment Hero has combined their end-to-end
employment infrastructure with their suite of AI employment
agents (Hero AI) to centralise and manage employment
complexity at global scale for the first
time.
HeroForce is an AI-enabled evolution of
co-employment models, which offers a new choice for New
Zealand businesses where Employment Hero becomes the legal
employer, managing recruitment, payroll, compliance and HR
administration, while businesses retain full operational
control of their workforce and culture.
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While
successful internationally, a local model has been
previously unworkable at scale in New Zealand due to the
structural complexity of the national system, making it too
costly to manage. Now AI can automate everyday compliance
and admin, making this traditional model even more
cost-effective.
Thompson. Photo/Supplied.
CEO and
Co-Founder, Ben Thompson, says HeroForce will overcome the
significant structural barriers holding Kiwi employers and
employees back.
“Most businesses aren’t failing at
compliance because they’re careless or dishonest.
They’re struggling because individual employers are trying
to solve an extremely specialised regulatory problem while
also running the business. The system has become too complex
to manage manually.”
The scale of New Zealand’s
compliance burden on small businesses is significant and
growing. The Holidays Act 2003 remains one of the most
complex pieces of employment legislation in the developed
world. The regulatory burden is continuing to grow, with
wage theft now a criminal offence and minimum wage and
KiwiSaver contributions increasing, adding further
administrative obligations for employers.
Employment
Hero’s Hero AI can interpret compliance documents, develop
rosters, automate payroll calculations and monitor
compliance obligations across thousands of employment
relationships simultaneously.
“That fundamentally
changes the economics of employment administration,”
Thompson said.
Employment Hero General Manager NZ,
Neil Webster, says New Zealand businesses are facing a
perfect storm of economic conditions: grappling with a
national productivity crisis, slow economic growth, and
increasing cost pressures across almost all
areas.
Webster says artificial intelligence is now
making it possible to relieve this growing pressure for
employers and providing a better experience for
employees.
“Running a business in New Zealand
increasingly means becoming an expert in payroll, HR, the
Holidays Act and KiwiSaver,” Mr Webster
said.
“HeroForce is about letting employers get back
to running their business and doing what they love, instead
of poring over employment legislation, which will ultimately
benefit Kiwi workers as well as businesses. A solution like
HeroForce offers SMEs a chance to transform the way they
employ their teams and how they run their
business.”
Thompson noted the significant
opportunity for the New Zealand economy.
“By
removing the friction that prevents employment, employment
becomes cheaper and simpler and as decades of historical
evidence tell us, businesses will employ more people to
build more, serve more, expand into new areas. Every hour
reclaimed from repetitive administration is an hour
redirected to work that actually grows economies,”
Thompson said.
Analysis of Professional Employer
Organisations (PEO) in the US shows user organisations have
twice the growth rate of comparable companies, have 12 per
cent lower employee turnover and are 50 per cent less likely
to go out of business(2). Organisations report an average
27.2 per cent return on investment, with a 3–5 per cent
service fee unlocking enterprise-level, fully-managed
employment.
Workers engaged through the HeroForce
platform are employees under formal employment contracts and
retain full protections, including award wages, KiwiSaver
contributions, leave and workers’
compensation.
“It’s been designed to operate fully
within New Zealand’s regulatory framework and is a direct
response to the country’s employment compliance crisis
that continues to impact SMEs especially.”
HeroForce
is now available for New Zealand businesses. Employment Hero
is making HeroForce available in New Zealand, Australia, the
UK and Canada, bringing the same AI-powered efficiency to
these high-complexity markets on its mission to make
employment easier and more valuable for everyone on
earth.
For more information, visit employmenthero.com/nz/products/heroforce.
About
Employment Hero
Employment Hero is the global
authority on employment, offering a world-leading Employment
Operating System (eOS) that simplifies and optimises every
stage of the employment process. Its award-winning platform
combines HR, payroll, recruitment, and employee engagement
tools with the groundbreaking employment superapp, EH Work,
which integrates career management and financial wellbeing.
Serving over 350,000 businesses and managing more than 2.5
million employees worldwide, Employment Hero reduces
administrative burdens by up to 80%, enabling organisations
to focus on their goals and create more productive, engaged
teams. By revolutionising the employment marketplace,
Employment Hero is making employment easier, more valuable,
and rewarding for everyone.
About
HeroForce
HeroForce is Employment Hero’s
employment fully-managed employment service. Under the
HeroForce model, Employment Hero becomes the legal employer
of workers engaged to perform work for a client business,
assuming responsibility for payroll, award interpretation,
superannuation contributions, workers’ compensation, and
employment compliance. Client businesses retain full
operational control, directing who is hired, how the work is
performed, and how long the engagement lasts.
Workers
employed through HeroForce hold formal employment contracts
and retain all entitlements and protections, including award
wages, superannuation, leave, workers’ compensation, and the
right to union representation. HeroForce operates fully
within New Zealand’s existing regulatory framework,
including relevant labour hire licensing requirements.
HeroForce is now available in Australia, New Zealand, the
United Kingdom and coming to
Canada.
References
(1)Employment
Hero (2026) Internal platform data and modelling on
employment administration and compliance costs, based on
350,000 businesses and $140 billion in payroll processed.
Sydney: Employment Hero
(2)McBassi & Company
(2014) Leveraging HR and Knowledge Management in a
Challenging Economy, cited in National Association of
Professional Employer Organizations (NAPEO), PEO Industry
Research](https://www.napeo.org)