Overview
The AI Buddy is an AI-powered onboarding assistant built right into the new hire app. It gives your new hires a friendly, always-available place to ask questions about their onboarding journey and get instant, reliable answers, grounded in your organisation's own onboarding content.
Instead of waiting for a colleague to come online, a new hire can simply ask the AI Buddy and keep moving through their first days and weeks.
🤖 Opt-in feature
The AI Buddy is an opt-in feature that is enabled per organisation. If you'd like it switched on for your environment, contact your CSM or our Support Channel.
What the AI Buddy can help with
The AI Buddy is designed for new-hire onboarding questions. It can help with:
Information about where to find onboarding materials and topics
The onboarding schedule, checklists, and first-week tasks
Company policies, culture, values, and team rituals
Where to find internal tools and resources
Because the AI Buddy knows where each new hire is in their journey — which courses they're assigned, what they've completed, and what's coming up next — its answers are personal and relevant to that individual.
Where its answers come from
The AI Buddy answers only from knowledge you provide:
Your onboarding courses — the courses and materials assigned to that specific new hire.
Your own knowledge sources — documents and text your admins add on the Knowledge tab (see Adding your own knowledge below), available to everyone in your organisation.
It does not pull in information from the open internet, and it never invents answers. It also respects course assignments and unlock timing, so it won't reference course content a new hire can't yet access. Your content is synced to the AI Buddy automatically on a regular basis, so its answers stay in step with your courses and sources as you update them.
Using the AI Buddy
The AI Buddy appears as a chat conversation in the new hire app, marked with an AI badge so it's clear the new hire is talking to an assistant. New hires are greeted with a short welcome message and can simply type their questions in natural language. Just like messaging a colleague.
Multilingual by default. The AI Buddy automatically replies in the language the new hire writes in, and switches language with them mid-conversation. No setup is needed.
Personalising your AI Buddy
You can tailor the AI Buddy to your organisation. Open the AI Buddy settings page and use the Settings tab to control how the buddy looks and introduces itself:
Avatar and name: give your AI Buddy its own identity. Set a first and last name and choose a photo from your asset library (optimal ratio 1:1), or reset to the default at any time.
Welcome message: customise the greeting new hires see the first time they open the chat. Changes only affect conversations started after you save.
Fallback contact: set who the buddy should point to when it can't answer. Add just the details — a name, email, phone, and/or link — and the buddy wraps them in the right wording, in the new hire's language. Leave it blank to use the default.
🔑 Who can access this
The AI Buddy settings page is available to Admins in organisations where the AI Buddy is enabled.
Adding your own knowledge
Beyond your course content, you can give the AI Buddy extra sources to answer from on the Knowledge tab of the AI Buddy settings page:
Upload documents: drag & drop or browse for files. Supported types are PDF, DOC, DOCX, XLS, XLSX, TXT, HTML, HTM, MD, and CSV, up to 25 MB per file.
Paste text: add a source by giving it a title and pasting the text directly.
Manage your sources: search, edit, and delete any source you've added.
Sources you add here are available to everyone in your organisation, and the buddy starts drawing on them shortly after they finish processing.
Trust, security, and boundaries
The AI Buddy is built to be safe and dependable:
No made-up answers. It only uses your onboarding content. If it doesn't know something, it says so and points the new hire to their manager, buddy, HR team, or the fallback contact you've specified.
Stays in its lane. It will not help with sensitive or personal matters (salary, payroll, bonuses, performance reviews, contracts, legal or immigration questions, or medical advice) and instead redirects the new hire to their manager or HR team.
Privacy-conscious. It won't share or discuss personal details, and filters out privacy-related information.
Clear disclaimer. New hires are reminded that AI answers may not always be accurate and that important information should be verified with their manager or HR.
Secure foundation. The AI Buddy runs on enterprise-grade infrastructure with built-in guardrails that block unsafe or off-topic responses.
The impact for your organisation
By providing reliable, fast, and informative support, the AI Buddy delivers measurable value. It amplifies the effectiveness of the onboarding journeys you've already built.
Reduce administrative burden: cut down the volume of repetitive new-hire questions that HR and managers have to answer.
Increase engagement: gives new hires reliable, on-demand support so they feel guided and informed, fostering a positive onboarding experience.
Get instant feedback: new hire questions tell you what is missing from your onboarding, or what needs more attention.
The AI Buddy helps new hires to get unblocked quickly, leading to a faster ramp-up and lower turnover risk in the critical first 90 days.
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