How Pleo turned a ticket form into a People platform

Pleo is a regulated fintech, which means compliance, data integrity and employee trust matter as much as speed. As the People team scaled, they needed employee support that could keep pace without adding headcount and without loosening governance.

Before Harriet, that support ran on a lightweight ticketing tool built into Slack. It did one thing well: it turned a message in an Ask HR channel into a form. An employee posted a question, received a set of generic dropdown menus, and submitted a ticket into a queue for a human to pick up.

That was the ceiling. The tool had no way to answer a question before it became a ticket, no way to personalise a request based on who was asking, and no path towards automation. Every question, however routine, still needed a person on the other end. As Pleo grew, the volume of repetitive, low-complexity requests grew with it, and the People team's capacity for meaningful work shrank in proportion.

So the brief was not a better ticketing system. It was self-serve support with real deflection, everything managed from inside Slack, and a direct connection to Pleo's HR information system so that automations could be built on accurate, live employee data. It also meant retiring the old tool outright rather than running two systems side by side.

Self-serve first, tickets second

The biggest shift was moving from every question is a ticket to most questions never need to become one. Harriet answers common People questions directly and around the clock, reserving human attention for the requests that genuinely need it. When a ticket does need a person, it arrives in the right inbox with the context already attached, so nobody on the People team starts a conversation cold.

None of it happens outside Slack. Requests, responses and full ticket management all sit in the interface Pleo's employees already work in, which removes the context-switch to a separate portal that made the old tool feel like extra work rather than less of it.

The connection the old tool could not make

The differentiator in this build was connecting Harriet directly to Pleo's HRIS. Rather than treating every employee the same, Harriet pulls the fields that matter for each requester, including location, contract type and applicable policies, and tailors both its answers and its routing accordingly. A question about parental leave is answered against the policy that actually applies to that employee's country and contract, not a generic company-wide default. This is the step the previous tool had no way to take. It could collect a request, but it could never understand the person making it.

A different scope of action for every inbox

Rather than pointing one generic assistant at the whole business, Pleo and Harriet built a distinct skill set per inbox, matched to the sensitivity, complexity and risk profile of that domain. The result is one agent whose autonomy is deliberately tuned team by team rather than applied uniformly.

In HR, Harriet fetches HRIS data to personalise responses and hands the People team full context the moment a ticket is raised. In Payroll, tickets are assigned to the correct triage point based on the employee's location, so the right regional specialist picks up each request without manual routing. In Procurement and vendor onboarding, Harriet keeps stakeholders updated on progress and contract details, which cuts down the manual chasing of status. In Risk and Compliance, she provides first-line guidance on topics such as anti-money-laundering queries, appropriate to a regulated environment. In Global Mobility, she reviews the details of a request and surfaces the correct follow-up actions.

Legal is the instructive one. Harriet is deliberately not positioned as a legal assistant there. She may only relay information verbatim from approved sources, and for anything beyond that she raises a ticket so a member of the Legal team reviews it directly. Legal judgment stays firmly with people. That restraint is the point of the inbox-by-inbox design: it let Pleo expand automation where it was safe and hold it back where human judgment needed to stay in the loop. Scoping what an agent may and may not do is the same principle behind Harriet's tool safety controls.

From answering questions to finishing the task

Harriet's role has since expanded past answering. With an e-signature integration in place, employees self-serve entire workflows, generating and routing documents such as employment verification letters and holiday requests through agent-driven processes rather than filing a ticket and waiting.

Underneath that sits less glamorous work that a regulated fintech cannot skip. HRIS data integrity underpins payroll accuracy, audit readiness and compliance obligations, so Harriet runs automations for consistent data cleansing and data governance across the HRIS, reducing manual upkeep that used to fall to the People team. She also handles ticket lifecycle management, including closing tickets by age and closing them when a requester goes quiet, keeping queues current without manual clean-up, plus internal triage and escalation flows and context-aware follow-ups in specialised inboxes.

Trust in a new tool does not arrive overnight, particularly for a team handling sensitive HR and compliance workflows. It grew quickly here.

What it became

By replacing a forms-based ticketing tool, Pleo consolidated its HR stack, retired a system that had hit its ceiling, and built a People function that is proactive rather than reactive. High-volume repetitive questions are deflected before they reach a queue. The requests that do reach a person arrive fully contextualised. Underneath, ongoing automations keep HRIS data clean, governed and audit-ready, which is what a regulated fintech needs.

What started as a request for a ticketing system became something structurally different: a People platform combining self-serve support, workflow automation and disciplined data governance, built inbox by inbox around how Pleo actually works. Other companies arrive at the same place from a different direction: Veracross expanded Harriet from HR into Customer Success before extending it to their own customers.