How we answer HR policy questions automatically

The same handful of policy questions land in the HR inbox every week — how much PTO carries over, what the remote-work policy actually allows, how the expense limit works for a conference, when parental leave starts accruing. The answers are documented, sitting in a Notion policy library the whole company can already read. But finding the right page, quoting it accurately, and drafting a reply takes a person's attention away from the HR work that actually needs a person: the exception request, the accommodation, the sensitive conversation.

We run an HR-policy helpdesk agent on Kortix that reads the inbox every 15 minutes, answers what's documented, and hands off everything else. It never sends an email itself and it never decides a policy question the library doesn't already answer — it drafts, or it escalates, and a human takes it from there.

The problem

HR policy questions are high-volume and low-variance — most of them are already answered, word for word, somewhere in the policy library. But the inbox doesn't know that. Every question waits in the same queue whether it's "how many sick days do I have" or "I need to discuss a medical accommodation," and someone has to open each thread to find out which one it is before they can even start answering.

A canned FAQ page only helps the employee who thinks to check it. A shared doc link in an auto-reply doesn't parse the actual question or point at the specific section that answers it. And routing everything to a person means the easy, already-documented questions compete for the same attention as the ones that genuinely need HR's judgment — the legal questions, the personal situations, the comp conversations — which is exactly backwards.

What we built

On Kortix, a cron fires every 15 minutes and spawns a fresh session with read-only access to the HR Gmail inbox and the Notion policy library, plus a channel into Slack. It reads new questions, classifies each one, and for anything the library documents, searches for the exact policy section and drafts a grounded reply as a Gmail draft — never sent automatically. Anything ambiguous, legal, personal, or compensation-related gets posted to the HR Slack channel instead, with the question and the reason it needs a person, and the agent does not attempt an answer.

How it works

Guardrails

The agent touches an employee's inbox and the company's policy record, so its access is scoped and every output is held for a person:

• Answer from documented policy only. The agent never invents, infers, or extends a policy beyond what's written in the Notion library. If the library doesn't clearly cover the question, it escalates instead of guessing.
• Drafts only, never sends. Every reply the agent writes is a Gmail draft. HR reviews and sends it; the agent has no send authority.
• No exceptions, ever. The agent cannot grant, waive, or bend a policy — that judgment call belongs to HR, not the agent.
• Hard escalation triggers. Anything ambiguous, legal in nature, about an individual's personal situation, or related to compensation is routed to Slack for a human, with no attempted answer.
• Read-only into the policy library. The agent never edits a Notion page.
• Scoped secrets. Gmail and Notion access is brokered through connectors, never exposed to the model or written to logs.

The outcome

The routine policy questions that used to sit in the queue behind everything else now get a cited, ready-to-send draft within 15 minutes, quoting the exact policy that answers them. The questions that actually need HR's judgment show up in Slack immediately, with nothing guessed at in between. The agent reads and drafts; HR decides and sends.