August 5, 2025
Every hospitality Head of People I know works incredibly hard.
But it’s a bit like an iceberg… most of the work is hidden from view.
No one else in the business seems to appreciate that managing hundreds or thousands of people creates a huge admin, compliance and service burden.
And most Heads of People I know are frustrated that the work they have to do just to keep the show on the road gets in the way of them focusing on work that would really make a difference to their teams and the business.
But AI is starting to make a real difference to the way People teams work.
So if you’ve been playing with ChatGPT and you want to take the step up to the next level, here are six use cases that you can implement right now to save time, reduce compliance risk, create a better employee experience and improve business performance…
Imagine if you could get ChatGPT to answer questions using the information from your company’s documents. Well that’s a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) system… and it’ll save you hours.
You just need to upload things like your employee handbook, recipes, SOPs, training materials and FAQs to the knowledge library and then the chatbot can answer questions like:
Setting up a RAG chatbot means you never have to answer the same question twice. It takes the pressure off your frontline managers and more experienced team members to be constantly answering questions from colleagues. And it’ll get rid of 80% of the emails that currently hit your People team inbox.
And the best news, you can get this for free with the free version of Youda.
Change of hours letters. Change of locations. Promotions. New contracts. Grievances and disciplinaries. Employment references. It’s a lot of paperwork!
Well now on Youda you can upload a copy of your document templates, and then just ask the agent:
“Hey Youda, can you create a change of hours letter for Jane Smith. She’s changing from 40 to 30 hours, effective on 1 September 2025.”
And the agent will create the first draft of the document for you.
This is one of the more established use cases of AI/machine learning, but once you get to 10+ sites, or 150+ people it makes sense to look at predictive scheduling.
It’ll save your managers’ time and it should reduce your labour costs by 2.5 - 5% by helping you to match staffing levels to fluctuating demand.
Heads of People spend lots of time worrying about whether other people are going to do what they’re meant to do, when they’re meant to do it!
And they spend hours every week, chasing colleagues with reminders…
“You need to renew your right to work status”
“You need to complete your compliance training”
“You need to complete a return to work check”
“You need to do the performance reviews for your teams”
At times it can feel like you’re just constantly nagging people!
But now you can set up AI agents to automate all those reminders, notifications and compliance workflows.
So if someone’s off sick, an agent can automatically get notified by the rota. The agent can then send a return to work check to the employee and then forward the completed questionnaire to their manager.
If someone’s visa is due to expire, an agent can automatically send the team member a reminder to renew it. And the agent can keep chasing them until it’s done or flag to the manager and People team that they need to come off the rota.
So instead of constantly chasing people, Heads of People can leave the agent to handle ‘business as usual’ and just get involved when the agent notifies them that there’s a problem or issue that it hasn’t been able to resolve.
At Youda we think the right way to build AI agents is to give them one job. So you might create an agent with the instruction: “after two months service, remind a new starter that they will be auto-enrolled into our pension scheme”.
But you can also string multiple agents together to create more complex and adaptable user journeys or ‘products’ that guide employees through key moments of the employee journey.
You’re looking for the moments that have a disproportionate impact on how an employee feels about your company and how they perform.
These could be ‘transitions’ like onboarding, off-boarding, parental leave or a promotion.
Or they could be ‘milestone’ moments, like a work anniversary, birthday or the first time you get personally mentioned in a customer review.
But if you want to create a great employee experience at scale, you need to turn these moments into ‘products’ — standalone experiences that are designed with the employee as a user, and which generate the data that allows them to be continuously improved.
The onboarding experience for new starters is a great place to start. If you’d like some inspiration for how you could take a more product orientated approach to onboarding, check out our Onboarding Playbook.
Before AI, it was a real challenge to get actionable insights from your people once you started operating at scale. When you have hundreds or thousands of people, you tend to start relying on engagement surveys for an insight into how your people are thinking and feeling. A traditional engagement survey will give you some ‘benchmarking’ data, but Likert scale responses to questions rarely give you the clarity about what you actually need to focus on to improve employee engagement and business performance.
But with AI you can set up agents to have conversations with your team so you can get their feedback and identify ways to improve.
So for example, you could set up an agent that talks to every new starter at the end of their first week.
The agent might start by asking: “How was your first week on a scale of 1 - 10?”
But it can then use natural language processing to respond to the answer and ask follow-up questions, like:
“What were you expecting? And have we lived up to those expectations?”
“What’s been the biggest surprise?”
“Has anyone on the team done a particularly good job of looking after you?”
“What did they do that you really appreciated?”
“What has been the thing you’ve found most challenging?”
“If we could change one thing about our onboarding experience, what would you recommend we change?”
The agent will act like a little researcher, asking genuine questions that will give you real insights into where you can focus your time and energy.
And once you have multiple reports, you can then get a second agent to analyse all the results to identify the key themes, sentiments and areas for improvement.
—
If you’re interested in learning more about what’s now possible with agentic AI, download a copy of our e-book: 2025 - the year of the agent: everything hospitality People teams need to know about AI.
Or why not book in time for a quick chat.
Let’s have a chat.
