- AI is streamlining onboarding processes for companies of various sizes.
- At Hitachi and Texans Credit Union, AI saves time and boosts engagement in the new-hire experience.
- This article is part of “AI in Action,” a series exploring how companies are implementing AI innovations.
When your organization has nearly 300,000 global employees across the US, Japan, and Europe, many of whom work remotely, how do you manage onboarding new hires?
That scenario presented Hitachi with challenges to keep new employees engaged, but also an opportunity to overhaul its onboarding with an AI digital assistant this past fall.
Hitachi — along with smaller companies like Texans Credit Union — is incorporating AI into onboarding to save time and reduce delays. AI-assisted onboarding is common in tech companies, but it’s also important in high-growth firms that are rapidly adding many employees, said Edie Goldberg, the president and founder of the human resources consulting firm E. L. Goldberg & Associates.
On the back end with human resources, artificial intelligence can help arrange paperwork for new hires to sign and trigger notifications to various departments. For employees, AI could take the form of a chatbot available 24/7 to answer new-hire questions in natural language.
“Employees work all over the place in different time zones,” Goldberg said. “Something that’s going to answer your question when you need it is really helpful.”
As HR and tech leaders apply AI to onboarding, the key is to have a clear plan of what problems the technology can solve, metrics for success, and a test-and-learn mentality that spans departments.
Useful AI implementation starts with honest conversations about pain points
Business leaders looking to integrate AI into employee onboarding processes should first identify pain points, Bala Krishnapillai, the vice president and head of the IT group for the Americas at Hitachi, told Business Insider.
While AI applications can certainly improve productivity, the technology is “like a shiny object,” Krishnapillai said, adding: “Everyone wants to get into AI.” Determining problems can inform research and conversations that lead to selecting or building a way to fulfill a company’s specific needs.
At Texans Credit Union, leaders identified a major operational problem: Its logins and system access weren’t ready for employees when they started, Jenni Short, the financial institution’s chief people officer, said.
“We spent a lot of time making sure that their desk looked nice,” Short said. “But, oh, you can’t actually log in to the computer.”
In September, the firm added robotic process automation to its onboarding, which ensured new hires had access to systems. The process took about six months and started with HR collaborating closely with IT.
“The HR department had five people in it, and no one had the skill set to build or necessarily understand all of the things that we could do,” Short said. IT came up with the idea to apply robotic process automation to new hires’ logins.
Texans Credit Union’s main performance metric for the automation project was the amount of time saved. Before automation, setting up access took 15 to 20 minutes per new hire. Now it takes less than a minute. Managers can also spend less time on administrative work and more time welcoming their hires, and those employees can get acclimated right away.
“Everything is ready for them,” Short said, adding that hires could “focus on learning as opposed to trying to figure out how to log in.”
Hitachi identified its pain point as process delays. Onboarding employees took 10 to 15 days and involved many manual forms, such as a notice to IT to get the new employee’s laptop set up or to facilities to ensure the person had an ID badge and a desk if they worked on-site. New hires’ questions weren’t answered in real time, which risked the company losing their engagement.
Hitachi uses time reduction as a key performance indicator, Krishnapillai said. The IT department conducted market research and built a private AI system with a custom large language model. Workers fed the model with data from corporate sites, PowerPoint presentations, PDF files, and employment books so that it could accurately answer new hires’ questions.
IT then worked with HR to beta test the AI onboarding agents with various departments. Once KPIs and service-level agreements were met, teams scaled the AI for onboarding in October after the roughly six-month process.
The results: saving four days in onboarding and reducing HR staff involvement from 20 hours per new hire to 12 hours, said Krishnapillai.
Customizing AI to match companies’ needs
What excites many leaders about AI in onboarding is the ability to customize the technology to their unique needs, Goldberg of E. L. Goldberg & Associates said.
“AI has various flavors,” Krishnapillai said, adding that companies could look at their technological maturity to determine where and how to start with AI. One “flavor” is generative AI, such as ChatGPT, which is a relatively simple application to adopt. Agentic AI, which acts autonomously and makes decisions, may be more advanced.
Goldberg said many companies start with automating rudimentary processes, like setting up email or assigning equipment. Automated nudges can notify a new hire or HR if a person hasn’t signed a document or completed an assigned training.
“All these little tasks are very routine, and they’re just perfect for AI,” Goldberg told BI.
Texans Credit Union plans to eventually automate more HR functions, such as assigning a desk or parking space, Short said. Right now, these processes require multiple email interactions to be completed.
Ultimately, Goldberg said, any AI application a company deploys needs to meet predetermined metrics and enhance the new employee’s onboarding experience.
“It’s not just that it’s administratively easier for HR,” Goldberg said, adding that the hires should see the benefits of autofilling multiple forms or gaining quick access to FAQs: “It’s really in service of creating a better experience for that new employee.”