PEOPLE

IBM has spent nearly a decade rebuilding its HR function around AskHR, an internal AI agent developed to replace a patchwork of legacy support tools. The system now handles more than 16 million employee interactions a year, resolving 94 % of questions without escalation to a human adviser, according to IBM. That level of adoption didn’ t come easily – IBM only achieved it after removing the usual fallback options, cutting the HR phone line and email address and routing 21,000 frontline managers through the tool directly. Nickle LaMoreaux, IBM’ s Senior Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer, has been candid

about how rocky that transition was, with employee sentiment scores initially collapsing before recovering. She says:“ It was a rocky road. It was anything but amazing.” IBM has since layered agentic capabilities on top of AskHR, treating it as an orchestration layer across the company’ s HR systems rather than a simple chatbot. The rebuild has cut IBM’ s HR operating budget by 40 %.

IBM has built AskHR, an internal AI agent that resolves 94 % of employee HR questions automatically.