The Problem
A marketing agency had a growing team across multiple geographies and a small HR group fielding the same policy questions over and over. Employees were either DM'ing HR, asking their manager, or — worst case — guessing. Most policy answers lived in PDFs nobody could find, and the docs that could be found weren't always current.
Two costs compounded: employees burning time hunting for answers, and the HR team spending hours every week answering the same handful of questions in slightly different words.
What We Diagnosed
The agency already lived in Slack. Standing up another portal, app, or knowledge base would have failed adoption — employees would default to DM'ing HR and skip the tool. The bot needed to live where the questions were already being asked.
We also identified categories of HR content that should NOT go in the bot: pay band data (too sensitive) and anything tied to individual employee records (privacy). Those stay with the HR team.
What We Built
- A Slack bot that answers HR questions via RAG over the agency's policy and benefits docs
- Self-serve document upload tool for the HR team — they push updated docs, the bot indexes them
- Clickable source citations on every answer, so employees can verify
- Privacy-preserving query logging — content stored for quality review, never tied to a person
- Common-links management for the forms, portals, and resources HR pushes most often
- Feedback collection via emoji reactions, feeding into HR's improvement queue
The Results
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Avg time to answer an HR question | Hours / next day | Seconds |
| HR team time fielding repeat questions | High | Materially reduced |
| Time saved per week across the org | — | ~50 hrs |
| Employee adoption (already in Slack) | — | High from day one |
The compounding effect: HR's time freed up for the work that actually requires HR judgment, instead of policy lookups. And employees stopped quietly making decisions on outdated information.