HR teams spend too much time answering the
same policy and onboarding questions. Employees wait. Managers
improvise. And the moment a question becomes medical,
legal, compensation-related, or employee-specific, a fast answer can
become a serious risk. The opportunity is not
autonomous HR. It is a safer front door
for approved policy knowledge.
The HR Policy Agent begins with one controlled
workflow. Ask about expense timing and it returns
the approved fifteen-day rule, includes the receipt threshold,
names the policy section, and states that no
escalation is required. The answer is useful because
the source and boundary appear with the response,
not in a separate governance document.
Now ask for the current mileage reimbursement rate.
The source confirms that approved business mileage may
be reimbursed, but it does not contain the
current rate. Instead of filling the gap with
a remembered number or a public rate, the
agent says the detail is missing and routes
the employee to the current company form or
HR Operations.
A request to approve medical leave crosses a
different line. The agent does not interpret eligibility
and does not approve anything. It explains that
employee-specific, medical, legal, compensation, and approval questions belong
with HR Operations. This is the operating model
in one screen: automate lookup, make limitations visible,
and preserve human authority where judgment matters.
Trust is tested before launch. The evaluation set
covers ordinary policy questions, escalation cases, refusal behavior,
missing source details, and employee-specific requests. These are
deterministic prototype checks using synthetic demo content. They
demonstrate the acceptance pattern a real pilot would
need; they are not production results or legal
validation.
Launch readiness names the pilot audience, approved topics,
source owner, review cadence, and excluded decisions. A
first deployment can be a simple web or
Teams experience grounded in a small, controlled source
set. Expansion should follow evidence from real questions
and review logs, not enthusiasm for a broad
employee assistant.
This demonstration uses synthetic policy content and does
not connect to a live HR system. The
reusable pattern is what matters: one knowledge domain,
approved sources, a named owner, explicit answer boundaries,
a reviewable evaluation set, and escalation for decisions
the agent must never make.
For HR and operations leaders, the value is
practical: fewer repeated interruptions, more consistent onboarding, faster
policy lookup, and lower risk from confident guessing.
The agent does not replace HR expertise. It
protects that expertise by handling governed lookup and
routing exceptions cleanly.
If employees and managers repeatedly ask the same
policy question, start with a one-week, three-thousand-five-hundred-dollar Agent
Readiness Mini-Audit. We identify the first HR knowledge
domain, inspect approved sources, define refusal topics and
escalation owners, and return a fixed-scope pilot recommendation.
Bring one recurring question. We will determine whether
it is ready for a governed agent.