Employee Onboarding AI Employee
The Employee Onboarding AI Employee is built from the Employee Onboarding curated template (category: HR). It is a chat AI Employee (AIE) that gives employees instant answers about benefits, IT setup, policies, team structure, and payroll. It classifies each question by topic, searches your HR Knowledge base, and composes a clear answer — and it flags questions that need a person so they reach your HR team instead of getting a guessed reply.
Template name. In the product, the curated template is named Employee Onboarding. There is no template literally named "Employee Service" in ema-next; Employee Onboarding is the curated HR self-service assistant and is the basis for this page. A second HR template, Policy Assistant, offers a narrower policy-only lookup — see Templates overview.
Workflow
The template ships a three-agent workflow that runs left to right:
| Node | Agent type | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Classify Topic | intent_classification | Sorts the question into an HR topic and flags whether it needs human HR intervention. Ships with six topics: benefits, IT_setup, policies, team_info, payroll, general. |
| Search HR Docs | search_respond | Searches your HR Knowledge base for the policies, guides, and procedures relevant to the question, including specific steps and links where available. |
| Compose Answer | respond | Writes a welcoming, clear answer from the search results. If the question needs a person, it says so and tells the employee their HR contact will follow up. |
A start node feeds the workflow input in, and a publish node exposes the final answer. The edges run start → classify → search → respond → publish.
The Classify Topic node ships with its topics pre-filled in the agent's type_config. For example:
{
"intents": [
{ "label": "benefits", "description": "Health insurance, 401k, PTO, and other employee benefits",
"examples": ["When does my health insurance start?", "How much PTO do I get?"] },
{ "label": "IT_setup", "description": "Laptop, software access, VPN, or email setup",
"examples": ["How do I set up my laptop?", "I need access to Slack"] },
{ "label": "policies", "description": "Company policies, code of conduct, or compliance",
"examples": ["What is the work from home policy?", "Where can I find the employee handbook?"] },
{ "label": "payroll", "description": "Pay schedule, direct deposit, tax forms, or W-2",
"examples": ["When do I get paid?", "How do I set up direct deposit?"] }
]
}
(The shipped template also includes team_info and general topics.)
Starting configuration
The template clones in with this configuration, which you can change in the builder:
- Model selection — Let Fusion Pick (EmaFusion™ chooses the model per request).
- Optimization priority — Balanced.
- Conversation context — enabled, for multi-turn follow-ups.
- Feedback — enabled, with thumbs-up / thumbs-down reasons and free-text comments.
- Welcome message — "Welcome aboard! I'm your onboarding assistant. Ask me anything about getting started."
- Conversation starters — three buttons: "Benefits & policies", "IT setup help", "Team info".
Recommended data sources: connect your employee handbook, IT setup guides, benefits documentation, and company policies as Knowledge bases.
How to use
After you select Use template and the AI Employee opens in the builder:
- Connect your HR Knowledge base. Add your employee handbook, benefits guides, IT setup docs, and org charts to the Search HR Docs node. See Knowledge bases.
- Customize the topic categories. Edit the topics in the Classify Topic node to match your onboarding FAQ, and refine each topic's description and examples.
- Adjust the response tone. Edit the Compose Answer node's Instructions to match your company culture, and confirm the escalation wording points employees to the right HR contact.
- Publish and share. Publish the workflow and share the link with employees — for example, on a new hire's first day. To put it where employees already work, connect it to a channel such as Slack or Microsoft Teams; see Channels and deployment.
HR content often varies by location, band, or role. Keep those variations in your Knowledge base content so the search step retrieves the right version, and use the Classify Topic flag to route anything ambiguous to a human rather than answering from a generic policy.
Example questions
- "When does my health insurance start?"
- "How do I set up my laptop and get access to Slack?"
- "What is the work-from-home policy?"
- "When do I get paid, and how do I set up direct deposit?"
Related
- Agent reference — the
intent_classification,search_respond, andrespondagent types in detail. - Knowledge bases — connecting your HR content.
- Templates overview — the full curated template list, including the Policy Assistant template.