Sanaf, the AI employee

An AI HR assistant

In most companies without an HR department, HR admin belongs to whoever has the least room for it. This job takes the routine half: the policy questions people ask over and over, the staff records that are never quite complete, and onboarding run as an actual checklist rather than a memory test.

What it does

Concretely

  • Answers the routine policy questions from your own documents.
  • Keeps staff records complete and says which parts are missing.
  • Runs onboarding as the same checklist every time.
  • Runs offboarding so the steps people forget under pressure get done.
  • Coordinates the HR paperwork that otherwise waits for a quiet afternoon.

Onboarding is different every time because it lives in a head

The list of things a new starter needs exists, but it exists as what one experienced person remembers to do, and what they remember varies with how busy that week was. The result is that two people hired a month apart get different first weeks, and the gaps only surface later as a missing form or an account nobody set up.

The same questions arrive every week

How much leave is left, what the expenses rule is, whether a particular day is covered: these are answered in a document that exists and that nobody reads, and they are asked of the busiest person in the building. Answering them from the document, every time, is both faster and more consistent than answering them from memory.

It does not touch anything sensitive

Grievances, discipline, pay decisions and anything of that nature go directly to a person, and the job says so plainly to whoever raised it rather than quietly routing them. This is the clearest boundary on the roster, because these are precisely the conversations where being handled by software is itself the harm.

Questions

Frequently asked

Does it make decisions about people?
No, and it is built not to. Pay, discipline, grievances and performance are outside its scope entirely, and it says so rather than attempting an answer. What it takes on is administration: documents, checklists, records and the questions your written policy already answers.
Do we need an HR system for this?
No. It works from the records and policy documents you already keep, which for most companies of this size means a folder and a spreadsheet. The problem is usually that the routine is unowned rather than that the tooling is missing.
What does it do when the policy does not cover a question?
It says the policy does not cover it and gets a person. Inventing an answer to an HR question is a particularly expensive mistake, because the person asking will reasonably treat the answer as the company speaking.