Offload routine HR requests with a policy-aware agent in Slack

Hi. I'm Luke. If your HR team still answers routine questions about travel policy or PTO by email, this is the kind of agent you could build. It runs in Slack, checks policy, and can even submit or escalate requests automatically.

So let's say I've got some travel coming up next week. So my first question is going to be, I need to fly from London to Dubai next week. Can I fly business? And so in this case, it's going to be a question that's going to be related to some of our travel policies across our organization.

And so let's see what the agent comes back with in this circumstance.

And so in this case, we can see that our agents come back with a response. In this case, it's saying that based on our company travel policy, business class is allowed for international flights over eight hours. However, it's noticed that in this case, because my route is London to Dubai, that it knows the flight is six to seven hours. So it's actually shorter than our policy threshold for automatic business class approval.

And so in this case, it's also got a tool here that can help with some live flight price information so that I've got a good background on some of the pricing. And what's really great is that it's also provided me with some documentation down here around some of the expense reimbursements and policies that we have as it relates to things like that business class threshold, as well as some items around the expense thresholds as well. Now all of these policies currently, in my case, sit within Google Drive, and it's really easy for you to be able to configure new data sources for your agent.

In my case, I selected Google Drive, to be able to ingest pieces of information that your agent's able to make use of in order to allow it to help it come back with suitable responses to some of those queries.

But let's go ahead and take a look at a slightly different example where I want to book some PTO in this circumstance.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to ask my agent, I would like to book some holiday.

And so in this case, let's take a look to see what our agent comes back with in this particular circumstance.

And so in this case, what we can see is our agent's come back with and it's provided us with some information on our holiday entitlement. So it's been able to reach into our HR system and pull back my specific holiday allowance. It's also been able to pull back my existing holiday requests that exist within our HR system as well and also provide me some information on my remaining entitlement. It's also asking for some extra information around the exact times that I want off. And so let's go ahead and ask it, in this case, for the 21st of May as the date that I want to book. Now this is interesting because this is just a day in advance. So let's take a look to see what happens when there's a difference between what I'm requesting and some of those HR policies that my agent has ingested.

In this case, you can see that the agent has come back and actually pushed back on this particular request because it's got that HR policy on our PTO requirements that says that PTO must be booked at least seven days in advance. And because it doesn't meet that, the agent has not been able to go ahead and create that holiday request for us. However, to be even more helpful, what it's done is actually created a support ticket for us so that our HR team can go ahead and review that if there are any requirements or exceptions to that rules. So as you can see, it's really easy when you give your agent that knowledge that if there's any scenarios where it's not able to take that action, you could bake in and build in those guardrails so that it's only responding and acting accordingly based on those existing policies that you might have.

Again, as before, it's also provided a link straight through to that documentation around our PTO policy. So let's go ahead and give it some valid dates. So in this case, let's do June 9th to June 10th as the dates that I would like to request. And so this should fit within all those policy requirements that we just went through previously.

In this case, what we can see is that our agents come back. And because it's got a tool that's been able to reach into our HR system and actually book this PTO, it's been able to submit that new request. In addition to the previous days, it's also updated and given us some information around our remaining holiday entitlement so that we're able to go ahead and take a look at that. If we go ahead and look at our HR system, what we should see is that it's not gone ahead and created that one on May 21st because it did not meet those requirements. But if we take a look at June, we should see that June 9th to June 10th vacation time added in there as well. So So it's been able to book that successfully because it meet those requirements.

Just one example of what you can build on one platform, every agent.