ServiceNow Employee Onboarding & HR Support Agent

Hello agent builders!

Your weekly AI agent use case deep dive is here to delve into a use case that we have identified from one of the largest agent builder tools in the market.

About this use case:

This week we look at the Employee Onboarding & HR Support Agent use case from ServiceNow Agents.

ServiceNow Agents is a new offering that allows teams to configure AI agents that are natively connected to the other services that ServiceNow provides.

So taking the example of HR systems for this use case, what if an AI agent could do all of the above mentioned functions for us? Being connected to the hundreds of relevant policies, processes and procedures, it could undertake tasks and even approve requests in a fraction of the time.

The Employee Onboarding & HR Support Agent is one such agent that can be implemented to handle tasks that normally take hours and places burden on HR teams to manage requests which fragments their attention and productivity.

This AI agent streamlines the employee onboarding process by automating document distribution, integrating common HR functions, and managing access provisioning. It personalizes onboarding material based on role and department, provides instant responses to HR policy questions, and ensures all necessary onboarding steps are completed in the correct sequence.

Key Benefits

• Reduces HR team workload by automating routine tasks and inquiries.

• Ensures consistent onboarding experience for all new employees.

• Accelerates time-to-productivity for new hires by providing immediate access to necessary resources and information.

Projected ROI

Based on industry averages for a mid-sized organization, each new hire processed through the system can generate an estimated $3,700 in value through:

• Reduced HR administrative time (~70% reduction in manual processing)

• Accelerated employee productivity (approximately 2 weeks faster ramp-up)

• Decreased administrative overhead and error-related costs

With an implementation time of just 12 hours, organizations can achieve positive ROI within their first few new hires. When calculated across an annual hiring cohort of 100 employees, the potential returns are substantial, with the initial investment typically being recouped within the first month of deployment.

Implementing the Employee Onboarding & HR Support Agent

Despite this agent being implemented within its native ServiceNow environment it is important to ensure it fits with your organisations specific requirements. With evaluation and pilots put in place so that the agent can become a truly valuable part of the organisation.

This should involve a process as follows:

1. Assess Current HR Processes

• Evaluate existing onboarding to identify opportunities for early pilot candidates. For example onboarding of retail floor staff as the first cohort.

• Catalogue the knowledge that must be accessible to the agent as well as what the onboarding steps are so that the agent may work with other automations already implemented.

• Define clear implementation objectives (workload reduction, experience enhancement, efficiency gains).

2. Configure ServiceNow Platform

• Set up the Employee Onboarding & HR Support Agent using ServiceNow's AI Agent Studio.

• Customize the agent to align with your organization's specific HR requirements from above.

• Establish integration points with existing HR Service Delivery modules.

3. Configure HR Services

• Define core onboarding workflows and case management processes.

• Set up document distribution rules and access provisioning protocols.

• Create automated response templates for common HR inquiries.

4. Enable Automated Support

• Configure the agent's response capabilities for HR policy questions.

• Integrate with your HR knowledge base for accurate information delivery.

• Set up automated task sequencing for onboarding steps.

5. Test, Evaluate and Optimize

• Run pilot tests with a small group of new hires.

• Monitor agent performance and task completion rates.

• Evaluate agent outputs with both a human analysis framework and using AI tools.

• Gather metrics on automation effectiveness and time savings.

6. Deploy and Onboard

• Onboard HR staff on the agent capabilities and management.

• Document best practices for agent utilization.

• Establish feedback loops for continuous improvement.

Putting effort into implementation and change management

The Employee Onboarding & HR Support A from ServiceNow has undoubted potential to drive efficiencies in organizations of really any size and as advocates of AI agents we think it is a solution that teams should implement in their early adoption of AI agents. However, regardless of ServiceNow’s and any large agent technology vendors claims, it is important to put some rigour around the requirements it needs to meet and a process of evaluating its performance through the use of tools and pilots.

Bonus - Building this use case with another tool

When you consider that the basic architecture of an AI agent is fairly consistent across most agent builder tools, most teams will start to think about consolidating the tools they use to a manageable set. To read more about this issue see our article The Coming Enterprise AI Agent Builder Dilemma: Multiple Tools, One Enterprise. 

Assuming you have consolidated your agent builder tools and ServiceNow Agents are not included in that list we can replicate this functionality using others such as Atlassian Rovo, Agentforce, Glean, Microsoft Agents or even a standalone agent builder frameworks like CrewAI. With many of these tools either having templates for this agent now or are likely to release them in the near future. See Atlassian Rovo Onboarding Buddy, Glean Employee Onboarding Automation. What may be likely however is that building agents with another builder may require data source connections that are not native to that tool and the setting up of API connectors may be beyond a non-technical builder.

In summary, if you have access to ServiceNow Agents or any other agent builder tool in your organisation it is highly advisable to implement this very strong early adoption use case. Once your team has experience implementing AI agents like this you’ll the be more confident taking on more complex AI agent challenges.