The Quick Read
- UpRush has spent more than a decade building HR services for Philippine SMEs, startups, and companies entering the country through Employer of Record support
- Its AI HR assistant, MyTAO, now drafts compliance paperwork, helps with payroll computation, and answers labor law questions with the legal basis attached
- The company describes MyTAO as one of the first AI tools built specifically for HR teams in the Philippines
- A fully remote HR bootcamp and consulting business, still active and drawing repeat batches of participants, remains the other half of what UpRush does
- The update reflects UpRush’s broader shift from an HR training and consulting shop into a fuller compliance partner for businesses of different sizes
More Than a Decade of HR Work Out of Makati
UpRush Social Geekers started in 2015 out of a small office on Ayala Avenue in Makati, working with a handful of consultants on HR training, payroll support, and compliance advisory for businesses that either had no HR department yet or needed extra hands running the one they had. Eleven years on, the company has grown into a fully remote operation, a structure it adopted in 2017 that let it work with clients across the Philippines rather than just walk-in traffic near its Makati address. Its work today spans Employer of Record services for foreign companies entering the country, salary structuring, workforce transformation projects, and public certification workshops that keep filling new batches. Its latest addition is an AI HR assistant called MyTAO, built to work inside that same daily HR routine rather than replace it.
A Training Business That Keeps Filling Seats
The HR Bootcamp and consulting work aren’t a side note to the AI push, they’re still the core of what keeps UpRush’s roughly 12,000 Facebook followers checking in. As of this month, the company was running Batch 34 of its HR Bootcamp Manila program, promoted as “back by popular demand,” alongside a separate paid session on organizational development scheduled for early September. That kind of repeat demand for in-person and live-online training says something the AI HR assistant alone doesn’t, UpRush’s client base still wants direct instruction and human facilitation, not just software. The two sides of the business appear designed to work together, MyTAO for the parts of HR that are repetitive and rules-based, and the bootcamps and consulting for the parts that need a live instructor working through a specific company’s structure or a manager’s specific problem.
Inside UpRush’s AI HR Assistant, MyTAO
MyTAO, short for My Talent Operations, is built to take on the paperwork side of HR that tends to eat up a disproportionate share of a practitioner’s week. The AI HR assistant can generate Notices to Explain and Notices of Decision, work through payroll computation, and answer questions on Philippine labor law and HR compliance, with each response tied to the legal basis behind it instead of a generic answer pulled from nowhere. Users can also download their conversations, which matters for HR teams that need a record for later reference or an audit trail.
Built With Compliance in Mind
The timing lines up with a broader shift in how Philippine businesses handle HR paperwork. More companies are turning to software for tasks that used to sit entirely with a compliance officer or an outside consultant, partly because labor rules keep getting more specific and partly because SMEs without a dedicated legal team need a faster way to check whether a notice or a policy is actually compliant before it goes out. UpRush’s pitch is that MyTAO handles that first pass, not as a replacement for legal judgment, but as a way to catch the basic mistakes before they become bigger problems.
UpRush describes its AI HR assistant as one of the first built specifically for HR professionals in the Philippines, a claim that reflects how the company positions itself in a market where AI adoption in HR is still uneven and most existing tools come from outside the country. Whether that holds against every competitor is something UpRush itself would need to track as more players enter Philippine HR tech, but the underlying pitch lines up with what the company has built its name on since 2015, making HR guidance easier to access and easier to trust. UpRush President and CEO Rhona Florentino has said the goal behind the tool is to help HR teams become “more efficient, strategic, and impactful,” not add another dashboard to check.
The Businesses MyTAO Is Actually Built For
The tool is aimed less at large enterprises with existing HR systems and more at the businesses UpRush has always served, startups building out an HR function for the first time, small and medium enterprises that need payroll and compliance support without a full in-house team, companies going through expansion or restructuring, and foreign companies entering the Philippines through Employer of Record arrangements that don’t require setting up a local entity. For HR professionals and people managers already stretched across those responsibilities, the pitch of an AI HR assistant is less about replacing judgment calls and more about cutting down the hours spent on routine documentation. The range is broad on purpose, a five-person startup working out its first employment contract and a multinational setting up a Philippine entity without a local office are different problems, but both tend to run into the same wall of forms, deadlines, and legal language that HR work in this country requires.
A Fuller Kind of HR Partner
UpRush’s growth from a small training outfit on Ayala Avenue into a company offering EOR services, HR certification programs, and now an AI HR assistant tracks a pattern more Philippine HR providers are likely to follow, especially as compliance work grows more complex and businesses look for partners rather than one-off vendors. For UpRush, the point isn’t the technology on its own. It’s what the technology frees up, HR teams spending less time on notices and payroll math, and more time on the parts of the job that actually shape how a company treats its people.
UpRush is based on Ayala Avenue in Makati, with more on its work at uprush-sg.com and on Facebook.
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