AI for HR operations has been top of mind since OpenAI launched its first large language models (LLMs). We were promised a productivity revolution. Hours saved. Admin wiped. HR transformed.
But for most HR teams? That future hasn’t arrived.
Why GenAI Isn’t Delivering on the Promise
GenAI is powerful—but too general to be useful out of the box. To get real value, you need to know exactly how to prompt it, how to avoid hallucinations, and how to check its work. Most HR teams don’t have time to babysit a chatbot.
Here’s the real issue: LLMs generate answers, but they don’t know anything. They're great at language, but they can’t take action or understand context.
What HR Really Needs: Agentic AI That Can Take Action
The next phase of AI for people operations isn’t about chat. It’s about doing.
Enter: AI agents. These are systems that don’t just respond—they act. They integrate with your HR tools, understand your workflows, and can complete real tasks on your behalf.
Imagine an AI that doesn’t just suggest a vacation policy—it opens the correct form, fills in the dates, and submits it. That’s AI self-service in HR, done right.
Big tech has already jumped in. Claude’s AI “computer operator” can take over your browser and perform multi-step tasks. But even the best general-purpose agents face a major hurdle: reliability.
The Problem with AI Agents: Chain Reactions and Reliability Risks
Say you’re trying to automate an employee request. Even a basic HR process might involve 9 or 10 steps—pulling data, checking dates, creating a ticket, updating a knowledge base.
Each step is 95% accurate. But when you chain those steps together, the odds of the full process succeeding drop fast. At 10 steps, your odds are barely 50%. That’s a coin toss—not a reliable workflow.
And when AI for employee questions affects real-world outcomes? The risks are serious. Ask the honeymooners who booked flights to Sydney, Nova Scotia instead of Sydney, Australia.
That’s not just frustrating. It’s a trust breaker.
The Solution: Reliable, Specialized AI for HR Teams
If you want trustworthy AI tools in HR, they need to be purpose-built.
Generic agents can't guarantee the reliability or data safety HR teams need.
That’s why we built Harriet, a specialized AI employee helpdesk:
- Built for HR process automation
- Embedded in Slack and Teams for instant access
- Integrated across your HR tech stack—from ticketing to knowledge management
- Powered by retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to reduce hallucinations and keep answers grounded in your real policies
With Harriet, you don’t get a vague chatbot. You get a reliable AI for HR teams—one that actually works in the flow of work.
Built-in Guardrails for Better Outcomes
Unlike generic tools, Harriet is designed with AI policy compliance and data integrity in mind. It understands where data should live, what permissions matter, and how to stay within safe boundaries.
This matters because in HR, “close enough” is not good enough. Whether you're handling leave requests, policy lookups, or onboarding workflows—you need an AI that gets it right the first time.
Easy Takeaways
- GenAI is too generic to drive real value for HR operations.
- LLMs can’t take action. They generate answers but don’t execute workflows.
- The future is agentic AI—AI that can complete tasks across systems.
- Most AI agents are still unreliable at scale. One mistake can derail the whole process.
- When AI impacts real-world outcomes, errors carry real consequences.
- Harriet is a specialized AI for HR teams, built for high accuracy, trust, and automation.
- HR tech stack consolidation, Slack HR chatbots, and self-service ticketing are all possible—if you start with the right agent.
AI that just talks won’t fix your admin backlog.
AI that acts will.