An internal HR policy assistant: answering employee questions with AI

How to put an AI assistant on your intranet that answers policy questions from your own handbook and hands sensitive matters to HR.

Picture the HR manager at a 300-person manufacturer on a Monday morning. Before ten o'clock she has answered three questions about vacation days, two about the expense limit and one about how to request parental leave. Every answer is in the employee handbook. Nobody can find the handbook.

That's the case for an internal HR policy assistant: an AI agent that answers employee questions from your own policy documents, and hands anything personal or sensitive to a person.

I build AI chat agents for a living, so I'm biased. I'll also be specific about what our product does and doesn't do here, because an HR assistant is not the place for vague promises.

Why people can't find the answer

Gartner surveyed 4,861 full-time employees at organizations with 100 or more staff, between September and November 2022. It found that 47% of digital workers struggle to find the information or data they need to do their jobs. The average desk worker used 11 applications, up from six in 2019.

Your handbook is probably in one of those 11 places, in a PDF last updated two years ago. People ask HR because asking is faster than searching. An assistant that answers from the same documents, at any hour, takes the repeat questions off HR's desk.

What AtomicX supports, and how it works

Our corporate page describes this use case directly: a separate agent on your intranet, trained on your employee handbook and policy documents, that hands anything it can't or shouldn't answer to your HR team. Your public site and your intranet each get their own agent and documents.

Here's how that works in practice, so there are no surprises:

• It's the same chat widget, on a different page. You create a separate widget configuration and embed its snippet on an intranet page, just as you would on a website.
• Access starts with your intranet. If the page sits behind your intranet's sign-in, so does the chat. If the page is public, so is the chat.
• Employee-specific answers go through an MCP connector. To check who's asking, or to answer something personal like "how many vacation days do I have left?", the agent connects to your HR system through an MCP connector. If your HR system already has one, the agent uses it. If it doesn't, we can build one for you.
• It's not our "staff chat". AtomicX has a private staff chat, but it's for Shopify and WooCommerce teams looking up store orders. It isn't an HR feature.

Step 1: Build a policy-only knowledge base

Create a new knowledge base under AI → Knowledge bases and give it a clear name, such as "HR policies". Keep it separate from your product content. The help pages recommend separate knowledge bases for different topics and audiences, and this is the clearest case for it.

• Upload the documents. The handbook, leave policy, expense policy, travel policy, onboarding guide and IT how-tos. TXT, Markdown, PDF, DOCX and HTML files are supported, up to 10 MB each.
• Check the extracted text. Click View on each document. If a table of leave entitlements came through garbled, fix the document before you go live.
• Consider Available for download. With it ticked, an employee who gets an answer from a policy sees a download link to that document below the reply. That lets people check the source themselves.
• Remove old versions. If both the 2024 and 2026 travel policies are in there, the agent may quote either.

Step 2: Create a separate HR agent

Create a new agent under AI → AI agents. Keep the Temperature low. AtomicX recommends 0.4 or lower for regulated industries, and I'd treat HR policy the same way. The Regular model is fine for most policy questions.

Here are example instructions for a hypothetical company. Rewrite them around your own policies and escalation rules.

• You are the HR policy assistant for Kestrel Manufacturing employees.
• Answer only from the HR policies knowledge base. Name the policy and section you used.
• If the policy doesn't cover the question, say so and offer to pass it to the HR team. Never guess.
• If a policy differs by country, site or contract type, ask which applies before answering.
• Don't give advice on an individual situation, such as a dispute, a dismissal, a disciplinary matter or a medical issue. Explain that HR will help, and hand the conversation over.
• Never ask for health details, salary, bank details or ID numbers.
• If someone raises harassment, discrimination, safety or wellbeing concerns, respond with care and hand over to HR straight away.
• Be friendly, brief and plain. Use the company's own terms for things like time off.

I'm not a lawyer, and this isn't legal advice. Employment rules vary by country, and your HR or legal team should decide which topics the agent may answer at all.

Step 3: Wire up the workflow and the widget

In Chat → Workflows, create a workflow with an AI Chat node that uses the HR agent and the HR knowledge base. Add a Handoff node and turn on Enable exit detection, with an Execution Condition describing when to hand over, for example "the employee asks about their own situation or wants to speak to HR".

Then create a new configuration under Chat → Configurations, with its own title and welcome message, and select this workflow. Two settings are worth a look:

• Chat Disclosure sets the recording or AI notice people must accept before chatting. Use it to tell employees that conversations are recorded and who can read them.
• Use Page Content for AI Answers is off by default. Leave it off on intranet pages unless you've checked what text they contain.

Generate the snippet under Insights → Widget generator and paste it into your intranet page.

Step 4: Decide who on your team sees what

This is the step people skip. Every conversation is recorded, and the Conversations page is open to Owners, Admins and Users on your AtomicX account. If your sales team also uses AtomicX for the website, they'd be able to read HR chats too.

Check your team members before launch, and give people the lowest role they need. Handed-off chats can be answered from Live monitor, the mobile app, or Slack if you use it with widget sync. Make sure those channels are ones HR controls.

Step 5: Test with HR, then with a pilot group

Use Insights → Chat test and ask the 30 questions HR hears most. Then try the hard ones: a question the handbook doesn't cover, a question about a specific person, and a complaint. The right answer to each of those is a handoff, not a policy quote.

Roll it out to one department first. Read every conversation in the first two weeks.

How to measure it

• Questions answered without HR. Insights → Analytics shows conversations, the Completion Rate and Handoffs by day.
• Topics that keep reaching HR. Many handoffs on the same topic usually mean a policy is missing or unclear. That's useful to HR in its own right.
• Answer quality. Generate analysis scores a conversation on relevance, helpfulness, tone and resolution. Show AI Details shows which documents an answer came from.
• Employee ratings. Thumbs up and down appear under Feedback.

Pitfalls

• A wrong answer is still your answer. We wrote about the Air Canada chatbot ruling, where a tribunal held the airline responsible for what its chatbot said. Employees will reasonably rely on your assistant too. Keep the documents current.
• Teaching without review. In the mobile app, a team member can tick Teach the agent this answer when handing back. That adds a learned answer to the knowledge base without review. Check those regularly with View, and delete any you don't want used.
• Contradicting documents. If the handbook and a newer memo disagree, the agent can't know which wins. Fix the source.
• Sending HR chats to other systems. If you use the webhook, transcripts and contact details are personal data. Only send what you need.

The bigger pattern

An HR assistant won't replace your HR team, and it shouldn't try. What it can do is answer "how many vacation days do I get?" for the hundredth time, cite the handbook, and leave HR to handle the conversations that need a person.

Start with one knowledge base of your most-asked policies and one pilot team. Want to talk it through for your intranet? Book a 20-minute demo, or read the knowledge base guide first.