Unlock a new era of human resources (HR) support to free up managers, employees and HR professionals from time-consuming, repetitive tasks.

IBM is proud to unveil a new set of enterprise HR agents that empower managers, employees and HR specialists to self-serve on HR-related tasks through a trusted, natural language chat experience.

HR agents are now available in private preview in the IBM watsonx™ Orchestrate catalog—they are designed to revolutionize how teams experience HR support and are tailored to optimize HR workflows across the entire employee lifecycle.

As HR leaders navigate the ever-evolving workforce landscape, marked by shifting employee expectations, a global labor shortage, and a growing skills gap, they recognize that the future of work is shaped by new workplace practices and advancements in technology, especially AI and automation. Our HR agents offer a transformative solution, empowering chief human resource officers (CHROs) to position their organizations ahead of the curve and deliver a superior employee experience while improving operational efficiency.

This is more than just a tech upgrade, it's a strategic investment in the future of your HR department, providing your team with the tools they need to thrive in a time where employee engagement, retention, and satisfaction are crucial to business success.

In today's fast-paced world, candidates and employees expect seamless, instant responses to their queries, and delays can lead to frustration and decreased engagement. Between handling inquiries, managing repetitive tasks, ensuring compliance, and driving organizational culture, today’s HR departments are stretched thin.

Emerging generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) capabilities tightly infused in digital automation present a new opportunity for HR leaders to transform HR operations, boost employee productivity and foster the modernization required for a competitive advantage.

Historically, building these artificial intelligence (AI) solutions to deliver new employee experiences required 12 months or more and millions in resource costs. This slowed down enterprises from driving long term sustainable transformation in HR using AI technology. To help accelerate and simplify the journey of transforming HR operations, IBM has infused nearly a decade of HR-focused AI and automation experience into HR agents.

HR agents shield employees from the complexities of underlying HR systems, tools and processes. They offer an intuitive AI-first engagement layer to provide answers to key HR topics and help employees navigate complex administrative tasks with ease. Imagine being able to automate the entire pipeline of approving time-off requests for multiple employees with just a few clicks. Or automating the entire onboarding journey—from collecting paperwork to setting up accounts—without lifting a finger.

HR agents can autonomously perform complex, multi-step tasks, such as coordinating workflows, and using tools and reasoning to enhance productivity across core HR areas, including employee support, talent acquisition and management, onboarding, learning and development, and much more.

Built on watsonx Orchestrate and powered by cutting-edge GenAI and automation, these agents give employees the ability to expedite tasks and boost productivity across teams.

• Pre-built integrations: Our HR agents are designed to seamlessly integrate with your existing tech stack including human capital management (HCM) platforms, ticketing tools, directories, and other HR systems. These integrations help ensure a smooth flow of information across your existing investments.
• Pre-built skills: A skill can be as simple as adding a row to an Excel table or as robust as generating a job requisition. Our prebuilt skills for employee support are now available in private preview, allowing users to quickly start testing a range of automations, such as requesting time off, drafting emails, updating profile information, initiating employee transfers and many more. While the initial focus is on employee support, the team is diligently working on additional HR use cases like talent acquisition, onboarding and more.
• Ability to customize without technical expertise: With access to the underlying IBM watsonx Orchestrate platform and its intuitive authoring tools, HR teams can configure the Agent to specific enterprise requirements without extensive coding knowledge. HR teams can tune it to specific HR policies, integrating it with custom internal applications and configuring search across the HR knowledge base to provide more accurate results, without needing to rely on IT teams and developers.

IBM has firsthand experience with the transformative power of AI and automation in HR. IBM’s AskHR automates more than 80 common HR processes and has strong adoption rates. It saves the HR department, IBM employees and managers significant amounts of time spent completing or supporting HR processes.

By automating routine tasks, IBM’s HR team has been able to focus on strategic planning, culture-building and talent development, delivering a simplified, personalized and data-driven HR support experience.

Our Vice President of HR Technology, Jon Lester, notes what sets watsonx Orchestrate apart: “It can engage with multiple people, of different roles, at the same time. It remembers what you told it yesterday and can apply that information to actions today, where applicable. Once the rules are set by humans, it will uniformly apply them. And it lets you build its skills: you can train it do certain tasks within one process, but you can easily have it apply those same skills to other processes. So, you can build use case after use case. It blows chatbots out of the water. It really is changing our understanding of the future of work.”

The rapid evolution of AI is transforming the workplace, and our HR agents are at the forefront of this revolution. We're committed to driving innovation, saving time for teams, and elevating the workplace experience for all.

Join the waitlist and be among the first to experience accelerated time to value and the benefits of our growing list of skills for high-ROI HR use cases, starting with employee support.