The No-Hype Guide to AI Agents in HR

AI agents are software that can watch what's happening, decide what to do, and then do it. In HR, that means things like: noticing a new hire hasn't finished their security training, sending them a reminder, and flagging their manager if they still don't complete it. All without someone manually checking a spreadsheet.

This matters because HR work grows faster than HR teams do. Onboarding alone touches HR, IT, finance, and the hiring manager. Performance reviews require chasing inputs from dozens of people. Compliance requirements vary by location. Most of this is coordination, not strategy. Agents can handle the coordination.

How Agents Differ from Chatbots

Chatbots wait for you to ask a question, then answer. Copilots help when you're already doing something. Agents work in the background without being asked.

A chatbot tells you the parental leave policy when you search for it. An agent notices someone's due date is approaching and sends them the policy, plus the forms they'll need, plus a reminder to their manager about coverage planning.

The difference comes down to three things:

Input: What data does the system have access to? Agents can pull from HRIS records, survey responses, calendar data, and more.

Reasoning: What should happen next? The agent decides based on rules HR has defined and patterns it's learned.

Action: Actually doing something. Not just surfacing information, but updating records, sending messages, or routing approvals.

Where Agents Actually Help

Here's where the time savings are real.

Onboarding

New hires have questions. Lots of them. "Where do I find the expense policy?" "Who do I talk to about my laptop?" "Is there a team lunch I should know about?"

An agent can answer the common ones instantly. For everything else, it routes to the right person instead of the new hire guessing who to Slack. It tracks what training they've completed, reminds them about what's left, and tells their manager if something's stuck.

The result: HR stops being the help desk for the first two weeks of every hire.

Employee Questions

Benefits, PTO balances, payroll dates, how to update an address. These questions are repetitive, the answers are in a doc somewhere, and answering them takes time away from actual HR work.

IBM's internal HR agent handles 10 million of these interactions per year. They estimate it saves 50,000 hours and $5 million annually. The agent doesn't just answer questions though. It can submit time-off requests, update records, or start enrollment in a benefits plan.

Performance Reviews

The painful part of review cycles isn't writing reviews. It's getting everyone to do it. Chasing inputs. Noticing that someone's 360 feedback is missing. Compiling everything into a readable format.

Agents can gather feedback, draft summaries from existing notes, track who's submitted what, and remind people who haven't. Managers still make the calls. The agent handles the admin.

Compliance

Training certifications expire. Work hour rules vary by location. Policies change and not everyone reads the memo.

Instead of quarterly audits to catch problems after the fact, an agent monitors continuously. It flags when someone's certification is expiring next month, not after it's already lapsed.

Spotting Problems Early

Turnover surprises usually aren't surprises in hindsight. The warning signs were there: missed 1:1s, declining survey scores, a manager who's stretched too thin.

Agents can surface these patterns while there's still time to do something about them.

What Agents Need to Work Well

Agents aren't magic. They fail in predictable ways.

Bad data in, bad actions out. If your HRIS has outdated information, the agent will make decisions based on outdated information. Agents work best when they're connected to systems that are actually maintained.

Someone needs to define the rules. The agent doesn't know what "good" looks like. HR needs to set boundaries: what it can do automatically, what needs approval, what's off-limits entirely.

Integration matters. An agent that lives in a separate tool nobody checks is useless. The most effective agents work where people already are, like Slack.

Humans stay in the loop. Agents can recommend, summarize, and execute routine tasks. They shouldn't make final calls on promotions, terminations, or anything sensitive without a human approving.

The Real Value: Coordination

The biggest win isn't any single capability. It's stringing them together.

Think about onboarding again. Manager submits hire request. ATS moves candidate to offer. HR generates the contract. IT provisions accounts. Learning system assigns training. Someone schedules introductions with the team.

Each step involves a different system and different person. Today, HR is the traffic controller making sure handoffs happen. An agent can orchestrate this automatically, with HR overseeing instead of manually pushing each step forward.

This is where Doozy is heading. Our platform already handles celebrations, coffee chat matching, onboarding workflows, training quizzes, and surveys. Each one is a moment in someone's experience at work. The next step is connecting them so the right thing happens at the right time, without HR manually triggering each piece.

Where to Start

You don't need to automate everything. Start by asking:

• What tasks eat time without creating value?
• Where do things regularly fall through the cracks?
• What would benefit from 24/7 monitoring instead of periodic check-ins?

For most teams, the answers are onboarding, employee self-service, and compliance tracking. They're repetitive, rule-based, and benefit from consistency.

Start small, with clear rules. Build confidence. The goal isn't to remove humans from HR. It's to stop spending human time on work that doesn't need it.

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Doozy helps people teams automate the repetitive parts of engagement. See how we handle onboarding, coffee chats, pulse surveys, and training quizzes.

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