The problem
Onboarding is the most expensive period of an employee’s tenure and the worst-documented, regardless of department. New hires spend their first month asking questions that have already been answered in a Notion page nobody links to — how to book PTO, how to expense a meal, where to find the handbook, who owns the security questionnaire process, what the dental plan effective date is. Every department has its own deeper-cut onboarding (engineering’s runbook, sales’ battle cards, customer success’ escalation tree), but the common basics are the same — and they are the questions people ask most often, of the people they ask least often. The result: a new hire bothers their manager with policy questions, and people-ops’s Monday inbox fills up with the same six questions every week.
Author
The HR partner authors the onboarding buddy in the AgentBundle dashboard wizard — no code. They paste in the canonical org-wide content: the company handbook, the benefits summary, the PTO policy, the expense policy, the IT-setup runbook, the org chart with team owners, and a directory of “who owns what” (security questionnaires, vendor approvals, swag orders). They wire MCP connections to the live policy docs (so the agent always references the current version) and to the HR system (so it can read the asking employee’s name, role, start date, and tenure). The reviewer-workflow controls referenced below ship on Business tier and above; see /pricing for what’s gated.
The agent is built around one rule: it surfaces what the canonical docs say. It never invents an answer. If a question is outside the canonical docs, the agent says so explicitly and tells the new hire who to ask.
Review
The VP People approves the agent. Because it’s the first interaction every new hire has with the org’s tooling, the HR partner is added as a second required reviewer. Both signoffs land in the audit log before publish.
Distribute
APM (Microsoft’s open packaging spec for AI agents) publishes the agent the moment both reviewers approve. Because the agent’s visibility is Org, every member of the organization can install it from day one — engineers in Claude Code or Cursor, sales in their ChatGPT-equivalent web client, customer success in their support tool, everyone in the AgentBundle dashboard. Same canonical agent everywhere; one install per new hire.
Use
One canonical onboarding buddy. Six different week-one questions across five different departments:
- A new engineering hire on day 2 asks “what’s the office Wi-Fi password and is there a guest network?” — the agent reads the IT runbook and answers; no Slack ping to IT.
- A new sales hire on day 4 asks “is dental effective today, or do I have to wait?” — the agent reads the benefits doc and quotes the effective-date language verbatim; no email to people-ops.
- A customer-success hire on day 5 asks “do I need approval to expense a co-working day this week?” — the agent reads the expense policy, returns the relevant excerpt, links to the approval form, and notes that approval is required for stays over five nights.
- A product hire on day 8 asks “who owns vendor security questionnaires?” — the agent reads the org chart, returns the right name and team, and includes the standard intake-request template the security team uses.
- A people-ops hire on day 10 asks “what’s the parental leave policy at my tenure?” — the agent reads the HR system to find the new hire’s start date, reads the policy, and answers. Self-served in seconds.
- An engineering manager onboarding their direct on day 14 asks “is my new hire allowed to expense a co-working stipend?” — the agent reads the policy, applies the role rules, returns a definitive yes/no with the policy citation.
Same agent. One install per new hire. Six different conversations, all anchored to the canonical company docs.
The deeper, department-specific onboarding (engineering’s runbook agent, sales’ battle-card agent) lives in separate agents that each department’s lead authors and approves themselves — same publishing pipeline, same audit trail, owned by the people closest to that domain.
Iterate
A new benefit ships — say, the company adds a mental-health stipend through a new partner. The HR partner updates the benefits doc and re-publishes the canonical agent. The new version is created with a changelog; the next time a new hire asks about wellness benefits, the agent surfaces the new option. No all-hands email that 40% of the company will skim. No HRIS broadcast. No “did you see the new benefit?” questions piling up in people-ops’s inbox six weeks later. The new policy is surfaced to anyone who asks, with the same accuracy as the policies that have been there for years. And when someone asks “when was the mental-health stipend added?”, the audit log answers definitively.