Joel McKelvey, Head of Solutions at Glean shares more about the impact of AI agents across HR processes and how they can enable better orchestration between finance, legal and IT teams to boost employee onboarding experiences:
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Tell us about Glean’s product journey so far in the HRTech realm…
At Glean, we’re focused on redefining how work gets done across the enterprise, including across HR. From the start, we’ve worked closely with people teams at some of the world’s most forward-thinking companies to tackle a fundamental challenge: information fragmentation.
HR teams often deal with highly distributed knowledge across platforms like Workday, Greenhouse, Confluence, and more. Glean connects it all, empowering HR teams, recruiters, and employees with a single, AI-powered experience to attract top talent, onboard faster, answer benefits questions, and surface insights from past reviews – instantly and securely. The result is a smarter, more responsive HR function that’s better equipped to support the entire employee journey.
We also help teams reclaim time. Employees can self-serve answers to HR questions through chat across enterprise messaging applications (think: Teams, Slack), reducing repetitive tickets and freeing HR professionals to focus on more strategic work. Glean acts as a real-time guide during onboarding, helping new hires ramp faster – some teams have seen up to a 40% improvement in time-to-productivity. And by making policies, documents, and compliance resources instantly accessible, we eliminate hours spent searching across systems.
Read More on Hrtech : AI Has Landed in HR. Is Your Organization Using It Wisely?
We’d love to briefly hear about your new AI enhancements and how it benefits end users.
HR teams have complex, multi-system workflows. Hiring a new employee, for example, requires orchestrating requests across Finance, Legal, IT, and Facilities teams, each of which operates in a different set of tools and with different processes. To help automate and streamline these types of workflows, Glean recently introduced Glean Agents, our horizontal agent environment built to help organizations deploy enterprise-ready AI agents at scale. For HR teams, this means faster, smarter support across the employee lifecycle – from onboarding and PTO management to policy questions and help desk automation. Glean offers 30+ ready-to-use agents, including HR-specific ones, that are easy to customize and quick to deploy, helping teams reduce manual workload and deliver better employee experiences with minimal ramp-up time.
We’re also deepening our partnership with Workday to enable agent-to-agent collaboration across both platforms. This integration will allow HR and Finance agents to seamlessly share information and take action across systems, automating routine tasks like updating records, pulling employee data, or generating insights. Together, Glean and Workday are helping HR teams work more efficiently, make faster decisions, and provide more responsive support to the people they serve.
How are work AI platforms changing the game for B2B teams across functions?
We’re witnessing a shift from siloed tools to interconnected intelligence, and AI platforms are at the center of this transformation. For HR teams, this means no longer relying on scattered systems or manual processes to support employees. Instead, AI can accelerate recruiting, connect teams across the organization, simplify onboarding workflows, surface key policies, answer employee questions, and resolve tickets quickly and accurately.. It enables HR teams to be more responsive, more consistent, and more strategic.
Across other functions like IT and finance, AI platforms help automate requests, streamline audits, and flag potential risks before they become issues. But what’s truly game-changing is how these platforms improve cross-functional collaboration, connecting insights across systems so teams can make smarter, faster decisions with full enterprise context.
What parameters or aspects should HR, IT, Finance teams bear in mind as they start deploying AI agents to assist teams across different departments?
When deploying AI agents across teams like HR, IT, and Finance, one of the most important considerations is making sure employees feel empowered. That means investing time up front to help teams understand what AI agents can do, where they add value, and how to effectively incorporate them into daily workflows. AI fluency is key to driving adoption and long-term impact.
Equally important is starting with real, high-impact use cases like automating repetitive requests, resolving common employee questions, or generating summaries and reports. Agents should be easy to customize, work within familiar tools, and reflect the unique context of your organization. The goal is to simplify work and free up teams to focus on what matters most.
In an AI powered future of work scope, what skills should modern workers hone in on to not turn redundant?
Employees should focus on building skills that AI can enhance. The most valuable workers won’t be the ones trying to do everything themselves, but those who know how to use AI to amplify their impact.
That means honing skills like AI fluency – understanding what AI tools can (and can’t) do, how to prompt effectively, and how to spot when human judgment is needed. It also means strengthening skills like critical thinking, clear communication, and adaptability. The goal is to work alongside AI in a way that makes you more strategic, more creative, and more valuable to your team.
Five thoughts on the future of AI on end to end business functions before we wrap up.
AI is becoming a horizontal capability that spans every function. As businesses adapt, here are five guiding thoughts we believe will shape the road ahead:
- AI agents will become embedded coworkers: They’ll handle routine tasks and serve as proactive assistants across tools and teams.
- Answering questions will evolve into orchestration: Instead of retrieving answers, platforms like Glean will coordinate actions and outcomes across previously isolated systems.
- Decision-making will become more real-time: AI will surface insights dynamically, helping leaders act faster with better context.
- Human work will get more strategic: With automation handling the repetitive, employees can focus on strategy, creativity, judgment, and innovation.
- Governance will separate winners from laggards: The ability to scale AI responsibly (with transparency, control, and security) will be a major competitive advantage.
We’re excited to be building for this future and helping enterprises unlock the full potential of their people with AI.
Catch more HRTech Insights: How AI Can (and is) Transforming Global Employment Practices
[To share your insights with us, please write to psen@itechseries.com ]
Joel McKelvey, is Head of Solutions at Glean.