July 22, 2025
For decades, HR and People Teams have complained about being seen as reactive, administrative support functions.
But the truth is, that’s what most People Teams have spent most of their time doing because they haven’t had the tools to take a more user centric, product orientated, data-led approach… until now.
Because with AI agents, People Teams can build now build digital ‘products’ that translate your employer brand into the reality of your employee experience.
Take onboarding employees as an example. If you approach onboarding new starters with an old HR ‘admin’ mindset, you’ll end up with a process that’s all about compliance. 📋
✅ Right to work check
✅ Contract
✅ Set up their software accounts
✅ Get them onto payroll
✅ Chase to complete compliance training
✅ Auto enrol them onto the pension scheme
When the People team approaches onboarding with an ‘HR mindset’ they make sure the compliance piece is taken care of, but the ‘human’ side of the experience is left entirely to the line manager and there’s often little or no measurement of the quality of the experience for the new starter.
In contrast, when People teams take a product mindset, they start by treating the new starter as a user of their onboarding ‘product’. They look to empathise with the new starter’s expectations, pain points, needs and hopes. They look for ways to respond to those needs and to meaningfully personalise the experience. They try to ensure that every touchpoint of the user journey reflects the company’s tone of voice and brand values. And most importantly, they start generating the data and feedback that People Teams need to be able to improve the performance of the product over time… just like you would if you were developing a digital product for your customers.
What’s great about AI agents is that People teams can now turn all these ideas into products. Think of the agents like little digital lego bricks that you combine to build out your employee experience.
So you could build agents that:
🏠 Personally welcome all your new starters to the business, shares your brand story and explains your values… so every new starter gets a consistent first impression of what they’ve signed up for
👭 Introduce new starters to their new teammates and other key people within the business
🗄️ Deals with all the admin: digital contracts, right to work checks, tax declarations, checking bank account details and setting someone up on payroll, creating their new account on the POS, LMS, rota etc
⏱️ When they clock out at the end of their first day, an agent can pop-up to asks them how their first day went…
👂And further agents can get the new starter’s feedback throughout their first 90 days
👋 You can also have supervisory agents that review and follow-up on that feedback by sharing useful information with line managers e.g. “Just to let you know that Jenny scored her first day 3/10. She said she found the experience a bit stressful and struggled to remember all the training she was given, especially what she was supposed to do on the till. You might want to find time for a quick check-in with her today, reassure her that everyone feels a bit overwhelmed on their first day and offer to go through the training again.”
🙋♀️ Agents can also answer common questions from new starters, like “when will I get paid?” or “how do I make a Mojito?” Or “how does our pension scheme work?”
🎟️ And you could set up agents that nudge new starters towards benefits, services and training resources.
🥳 Agents that recognise and celebrate key milestones like “Congratulations - you just got your first positive customer review!”
💬 Agents that nudges managers to make sure they schedule regular catch-up conversations with new starters.
Honestly, the possibilities are endless. And because agents are so quick to build, you can get to an industry leading employee experience in weeks.
And once you’ve set up these agents, they just run. Time and time again. And you can monitor the data they generate to work out which agents are working well, and which might need tweaking.
And then you can move on to the next priority in your employee experience and start building a new set of agents.
If you’d like to find out how Youda can help you take a product orientated approach to People, please book a demo call here.
Let’s have a chat.
