The context
In a large organisation, much of an HR team’s day goes on answering the same questions: how much leave is left, how a benefit works, which form applies, what the policy says about a particular situation. The answers exist, spread across policy documents, intranet pages and handbooks, but finding them is easier for HR than for employees, so the questions keep coming.
The challenge
The HR function of a global insurer’s national business wanted to free its team from that repetitive load without lowering the quality of answers. Accuracy mattered more than speed: in HR, a confident wrong answer is worse than no answer at all.
What we did
We designed the assistant together with the regional head of HR, starting from the questions employees actually ask and the documents that answer them.
The assistant answers employee questions using the company’s own policy documents, and shows where each answer comes from. When a question is personal, sensitive or not covered by policy, it does not improvise: it hands the case to the HR team. That design kept the team in control of anything requiring judgement, and let routine questions be resolved immediately.
The result
The system was estimated to reduce HR workload by 25%, and on the strength of that result it was evaluated for rollout across the group.
Why it worked
- It was grounded in the company’s own documents. Answers came from policy, with sources shown, not from general knowledge.
- It knew when to hand over. Clear escalation for sensitive or uncovered cases protected trust in the system.
- It was designed with the people who own the process. Working with HR leadership from the start shaped both the scope and the adoption.