HRCross-functional
Policy questions, answered. Cited, not guessed.
Employees ask about PTO, parental leave, or health plan deductibles and get an answer cited to the current handbook, SPD, or policy — the same day, not a ticket sitting in an HR queue. Anything ambiguous or sensitive still routes to a human generalist.
Every answer cited to the current handbook. Built on Sphere AI Foundry.
policy_qa — ticket #HR-2214LIVE
00:00Question → "How much PTO do I have after 3 years?"read
00:02HRIS lookup → hire date, accrual balance, tenure tierpassed
00:04Handbook match → PTO Accrual Schedule, tenure 3–5 yrspassed
00:06Edge case → carryover cap question, ambiguous state ruleflagged
00:07Response → answer sent, edge case routed to HRsealed
response time 7sanswers cited 100%human review on ambiguity
Built on Sphere AI Foundry·Reads the current published handbook·21 years, 300+ clients
The same 15 questions, asked all year
Most inbound HR tickets aren't hard — they're a lookup. How much PTO do I have. When does my new deductible reset. Am I eligible for parental leave yet. Every one of those already has an answer sitting in the handbook or the SPD, but someone still has to open the ticket, find the section, check it against the employee's tenure and plan, and reply. At a few hundred employees that's a queue. At a few thousand, it's a full-time job for people who could be doing higher-judgment HR work.
68%
of HR help-desk tickets are repeat policy lookups
7s
average response time vs. hours in a ticket queue
100%
of answers cited to a specific handbook section
Question in, cited answer out
Four steps, every one logged and citable back to the current handbook or plan document.
01
Ask
Employees ask in plain language, from where they already work
A question typed into the intranet, an HR ticketing form, or a Slack or Teams channel — no separate portal to learn, no keyword search against a PDF handbook.
Example question
"I'm going on parental leave in October — how much is paid?"
02
Match to the employee's actual plan
Not a generic answer — this employee's tenure, location, and plan
The agent reads hire date, tenure, work state, and benefits elections from the HRIS before answering, because PTO accrual tiers, leave eligibility, and plan deductibles vary by exactly those fields.
Example query
"How much PTO do I have after 3 years?"
03
Cite every answer
No answer without a citation to the governing document
Each answer links back to the exact handbook section, SPD page, or leave policy it came from — the citation travels with the answer, not as a separate lookup the employee has to trust blindly.
Cited answer
Paid parental leave is 12 weeks at 100% base pay for employees with 6+ months tenure.
cited to Employee Handbook §7.3, Parental Leave04
Escalate what shouldn't be automated
Ambiguity and sensitive topics route to a human
Anything outside the fixed question list — accommodation requests, disputed accrual, leave-of-absence disputes, terminations — gets routed straight to an HR generalist with the question and the relevant policy attached, not answered by the agent.
Routing
Answered directly ✓Routed to HREscalated — sensitive
10 fields, every one cited
What the agent returns with every answer.
Direct answer to the question asked
Cited handbook section or SPD page
Employee tenure and eligibility tier applied
PTO / accrual balance as of today
Benefits plan and coverage tier on file
Leave type and applicable eligibility rule
State- or location-specific policy variance
Enrollment or election deadline, if relevant
Escalation flag with routing reason
Full conversation log for HR audit
Typical inputs
What the agent reads, and what it connects to.
Documents
- Employee handbook, current published version
- Summary Plan Descriptions (SPDs) for medical, dental, vision, and 401(k)
- Leave-of-absence and parental leave policies, by state where applicable
- PTO / accrual policy and tenure schedules
- Open enrollment guide and plan comparison sheets
- Remote work and expense reimbursement policies
Systems
- HRIS (Workday, UKG, BambooHR, or equivalent)
- Benefits administration platform
- HR ticketing or case management system
- Intranet or employee self-service portal, Slack, or Teams
Is this the right fit?
Built for repeat, documented questions — not for judgment calls.
✓ Works best for
- Organizations of 150+ employees fielding a steady stream of policy and benefits questions
- HR teams wanting a documented, citable answer trail for compliance
- Companies with a current, well-maintained handbook and plan documents
Too small for
- A team small enough that one generalist already answers every question same-day
- Replacing judgment on accommodations, disputes, or leave-of-absence decisions
- A handbook that's out of date or inconsistent across locations — the agent will cite it faithfully, including its gaps
Grounded in your handbook, not a black box
Compliance-first, the same standard every Sphere agent is held to.
The agent only answers from the current published handbook, SPDs, and policy library — it will not infer a policy that isn't written down, and it will not answer questions about accommodations, disputes, terminations, or anything legally sensitive. Those route straight to an HR generalist with the question and relevant policy attached.
Every answer keeps a full audit trail of the question, the citation, and the employee context used to generate it — see how the same governed-AI standard applies across regulated deployments in Governed AI for Banks and Private LLM Deployment for Banks and Financial Institutions.
Prerequisites current handbook
A current, published handbook and plan documents required — the agent cites what exists, not what should exist.
Human review on ambiguity
Accommodations, disputes, and anything outside the fixed question list route to an HR generalist, never answered automatically.
Regulatory grounding FMLA, ADA, state leave law
Leave and eligibility answers reference FMLA, ADA, and applicable state leave requirements directly in the citation.
Foundation Sphere AI Foundry
Access controls and audit trail configured here carry forward to every other agent you deploy.
Frequently asked
Does the Policy & Benefits Q&A Agent replace our HR generalists?
No. It answers the repetitive, already-documented questions — PTO accrual, plan deadlines, leave eligibility — so generalists spend their time on judgment calls: accommodations, disputes, and anything that isn't a clean policy lookup. Ambiguous or sensitive questions are routed to a human, not answered.
What happens when the handbook or a plan document changes mid-year?
The agent reads the current published version of the handbook, SPDs, and policy library at answer time. When HR publishes an update, the next question reflects it immediately — there's no separate re-indexing step and no stale cached answer.
How does it integrate with our HRIS and benefits administration platform?
It reads current employee status, plan enrollment, and accrual balances directly from your HRIS and benefits administration system, and can post through your existing ticketing or intranet tool — no separate employee-facing database to maintain.
Is every answer traceable to the source policy?
Yes. Every answer cites the specific handbook section, SPD page, or policy the answer came from — there is no answer without a citation back to the governing document.
How is this different from a generic chatbot on our intranet?
It's built around your specific handbook, plan documents, and leave policies, with a fixed list of question types it will and won't answer on its own — not a general-purpose assistant guessing at HR policy. It runs on Sphere AI Foundry, so the access controls and audit trail configured here carry forward to other agents you deploy.
Start here
See it answer your own handbook
Bring your current handbook and one plan document to the demo. We'll show the agent answer real employee questions live — with citations, on your own policies.
Looking for a different workflow? Browse the full Agent Catalog.
Talk to a solutions architect
Direct to a senior architect — never a sales queue. Replies within one business day.
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