Atrium formalises its technology ambitions with AIR and ZephyrIQ
For years, enterprises have invested heavily in systems designed to manage their contingent workforce. Vendor management systems, dashboards, and reporting tools have become standard infrastructure. Yet many organisations still struggle to answer basic questions about cost drivers, performance trends, and programme effectiveness without weeks of manual analysis and specialist support.
Atrium believes this disconnect has become structural—and that it can no longer be addressed through services alone.
With the launch of Atrium Innovation & Research™ (AIR) and its first product, ZephyrIQ, the global extended workforce management provider is taking a deliberate step into product development. The initiative formalises what Atrium says it has been doing informally for years: identifying recurring gaps in workforce technology through hands-on programme delivery, and attempting to design tools that address those gaps.
Brad Martin, Atrium’s Chief Revenue Officer, will also lead AIR as President. He frames the move not as a reinvention of the business, but as an extension of how the company has historically approached innovation: “Innovation has been part of who we are since the beginning, and this is simply the next evolution of that commitment.”
Built alongside the rise of contingent work
Atrium’s development closely mirrors the expansion of the contingent workforce itself. Founded in 1995 as a boutique staffing firm in New York, the company has grown alongside organisations’ increasing reliance on non-employee labour.
Over more than three decades, Atrium expanded into a global, WBENC-certified provider of extended workforce management, now operating across the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and EMEA. Its service portfolio includes staffing, MSP programmes, Direct Sourcing, Employer of Record Payrolling, Independent Contractor Compliance, RPO, Early Talent Administration, HR advisory services, and Talent Technology consulting.
Today, Atrium supports thousands of organisations worldwide and engages more than 35,000 workers annually, across industries ranging from pharmaceuticals and biotech to media, retail, finance, and corporate services.
Throughout this evolution, Atrium has positioned itself as a service-led organisation. It emphasises a tech-forward yet platform-agnostic approach, integrating with clients’ existing systems rather than promoting a proprietary platform.
“What sets Atrium apart is its high-touch concierge service model, deep compliance expertise, a tech-forward yet platform-agnostic approach, and strong commitment to supplier diversity,” says Martin.
That positioning has helped Atrium build long-term client relationships. It has also given the company sustained exposure to the limits of workforce technology currently in use.
Where workforce technology shows strain
According to Martin, AIR emerged from patterns Atrium observed repeatedly across clients, industries, and regions.
“We have long partnered with a wide ecosystem of technology providers and work closely with them to deliver holistic, end-to-end program solutions. At the same time, we know there are still pain points in the market that today’s technologies do not fully solve.”
Those pain points are not primarily about data availability. Contingent workforce data is abundant, but fragmented—spread across vendor management systems, financial tools, supplier reports, and internal dashboards. Accessing it often requires technical expertise, and interpreting it still depends heavily on context.
“You may know the numbers, but not the why. You may see a trend but not understand the actionable insights behind it.”
Rather than attempting to replace existing platforms, Atrium is targeting this interpretive layer: the moment where data should inform decisions but instead introduces friction or delay.
AIR is structured to explore such gaps deliberately. The organisation operates with a lean product methodology, prioritising rapid experimentation and early validation with users over extended development cycles.
“We are now using a lean product methodology that lets us test ideas quickly, validate them early with real users, and move fast to bring new products to market.”
Why workforce intelligence became the first focus
AIR’s initial focus on workforce intelligence reflects both market pressure and Atrium’s operational experience. As contingent labour becomes more embedded in core operations, visibility into that workforce has shifted from a reporting requirement to a strategic concern.
“As a global leading service provider in talent and workforce solutions, we have a unique perspective on what success looks like for organizations with external workers,” says Martin.
From Atrium’s perspective, that success depends on one foundational capability.
“One of the key areas to success in any program is visibility of data. This drives program success and optimization, which is why it has become a natural area for us to innovate and the foundation for creating ZephyrIQ.”
While most large organisations technically have access to contingent workforce data, Martin argues that access alone is insufficient—particularly when the same data must serve managers, procurement leaders, HR teams, and executive sponsors, each with different needs and levels of analytical capability.
ZephyrIQ and the limits of dashboards
ZephyrIQ is Atrium’s attempt to rethink how contingent workforce data is accessed and interpreted. Rather than relying on dashboards, report libraries, or custom BI queries, the platform uses a conversational interface built on agentic AI.
Contingent Workforce data is complex and often a combination of data from disparate systems, as Martin points out. That complexity is familiar to most organisations managing extended workforces. While dashboards and reports are widely available, translating them into decisions often requires specialist support.
“Existing solutions include report libraries in various software and BI tools. The challenge is that both tend to be complicated, and even when you do manage to pull the data you need, you often still require a data analyst to explain what it means.”
Atrium positions ZephyrIQ as a way to reduce that dependency by changing how users interact with data.
“It offers a simple conversational interface where you can ask any question about your workforce and receive a clear, direct answer. It also provides you with insights that would otherwise require an analyst.”
Whether this approach meaningfully alters how organisations make decisions will depend on its performance in live programmes, but the intent is explicit: to reduce the distance between data availability and data use.
“ZephyrIQ shifts how people consume, interpret, and act on workforce data. It is a more consumer-friendly experience that delivers only the information you need, exactly when you need it, all on demand," Martin summarises.
A tool aimed at complexity, not abstraction
Atrium is clear about who ZephyrIQ is designed for. The platform targets organisations managing complex contingent or extended workforces, where visibility into programme data is often fragmented or delayed.
The rationale is pragmatic rather than aspirational. Improved understanding of workforce data, Atrium argues, should make it easier to identify inefficiencies, assess programme performance, and support governance.
Rather than positioning ZephyrIQ as a standalone analytics platform, Atrium frames it as a tool designed to support operational decision-making in environments where workforce complexity has outpaced traditional reporting models.
Early adopters as a test of assumptions
ZephyrIQ is scheduled to enter beta in Q1 2026, with Atrium inviting organisations to participate as early adopters. For AIR, these early deployments are central to how products are shaped.
“All of AIR’s products will go through an early-adopter phase, where we put early versions into users’ hands as quickly as possible to start gathering real feedback,” says Martin.
In other words, customer input will directly influence ZephyrIQ’s development.
“Their input helps us understand market fit, what is working well, and where we may need to adjust.”
As a result, the roadmap remains intentionally flexible.
A measured expansion into workforce technology
With AIR, Atrium is entering a workforce technology market already crowded with analytics tools, AI-driven platforms, and data-centric solutions. Its approach differs in that product development is being driven from inside a services organisation rather than a standalone software business.
Rather than positioning itself as a technology disruptor, Atrium is extending its service model into product development, using technology to address issues it encounters while running contingent workforce programmes.
The underlying question is whether operational experience can be translated into technology that holds up beyond individual client contexts. AIR represents Atrium’s attempt to do so, with ZephyrIQ serving as the first test of that thesis.