Agentic automation & RPA in human resources: use cases, examples & best tools

Agentic automation and RPA implementation allows companies to streamline many repetitive employee onboarding activities, including qualifications validation, company policies distribution, employee credentials generation, and orientation sessions scheduling. Moreover, AI agents can draft welcome emails and checklists for new hires, track their completion of necessary documentation, such as tax and benefits enrollment forms, and send reminders for missing signatures.

Such process automation solutions can also assist with the organization of employee training, scheduling training sessions, delivering training materials to new employees based on their role, matching new hires’ work schedules with those of their mentors, and updating training timetables.

HR teams can rely on agentic or RPA solutions to automate routine tasks involving employee data handling, such as its extraction, entry, and exchange across disparate HR systems. For example, when a new employee is added to the HRIS platform, RPA bots and agents can automatically update payroll systems’ data, as well as move information between HRIS, payroll, and finance tools to ensure that all recent changes, such as salary or benefits adjustments, are accurately reflected within corporate systems. Automation solutions can also detect incomplete or conflicting employee data, send notifications to HR specialists or requests to dedicated employees to address these problems, and delete or archive employee records based on the company’s data retention policies.

Agentic automation and RPA software can streamline tedious and error-prone payroll processing activities, particularly in cases where existing payroll or HR software lacks required functionality or is outdated, difficult to integrate, or costly to modify. HR departments use RPA bots and agents that automatically extract payroll-relevant information from sources like HRIS systems, HR spreadsheets, and time-tracking applications, check timesheets for missing or extra entries and inconsistencies, send automated notifications about detected issues to managers for review, and sync the data with the payroll system.

Consolidating, verifying, and reconciling data on attendance and absences of numerous employees can be time-consuming for HR specialists, as it involves diverse manual, data-heavy operations. Agentic automation and RPA tools can perform tasks, such as data extraction from attendance logs, leave requests, and timesheets, data entry into spreadsheets and payroll systems, and payroll reconciliation, much faster and with a greater degree of accuracy than human employees.

In addition to that, they can automatically compare absence reports with the time slots employees log into the corporate system, alert HR specialists if the information does not match, and send out reminders to fill out necessary forms. Agentic automation tools can also match leave requests with company schedules, established policies, and HRIS data to check employee leave balance and eligibility, update HRIS records upon leave approval, and generate standardized leave reports.

To accelerate the processing, verifying, and approving of work-related employee expenses, including travel, technology, and training costs, companies can introduce agentic and robotic process automation solutions that ensure that the expenses are reimbursed in time and in line with company policies. For example, by relying on optical recognition capabilities, process automation solutions can capture data from employee receipts submitted as images or scanned documents, determine data completeness, correctness, and expense validity, log this data into expense management systems, and compile reports on employee expenses on demand or on a scheduled basis.

By automating HR data validation and compliance checks and maintaining its consistency, agents and RPA bots help HR departments ensure compliance with labor laws, company policies, and contractual obligations. Such process automation solutions can collect employee benefits, expenses, and performance data from various corporate systems, check it against internal company policies and external regulations for compliance, and flag any discrepancies for human review. Then, they populate report templates with the approved data, streamlining compliance reporting and simplifying future compliance audits.

Agentic automation and RPA solutions help streamline labor-intensive employee performance tracking activities, including KPI data consolidation from performance management systems, the distribution of employee performance feedback surveys, and performance report generation. Using generative AI technologies, agentic automation solutions can also understand the context behind employee feedback, including its emotional tone, and detect frequently mentioned issues or achievements. Additionally, bots and agents can input performance data into dedicated systems and schedule review meetings, enabling HR specialists to spend less time on administrative tasks and more on career development planning and communication with employees.

RPA bots and AI agents can streamline employee offboarding processes by speeding up the collection of exit documents, automatically revoking access to company systems, networks, and software applications, sending exit surveys, and triggering final payouts and account deactivation. Bots and agents can also provide HR specialists with data on the employee’s assigned assets, such as a laptop serial number, mobile phone model, and access badge ID, from an IT asset management system, helping ensure that corporate equipment is not lost or forgotten. When requested, they can deliver emails to employees with instructions on how to return company assets.

Moreover, bots and agents can schedule exit interviews, populate offboarding documentation, such as termination letters, exit agreements, and compliance forms, with necessary data, and compile mailing lists with corporate alumni to allow companies to keep in touch with former workers.