United StatesTechnology and telecom2016 – ongoingIBM
AskHR employee support agent
IBM's AskHR agent resolves 94% of common employee HR questions without a person
Problem
IBM's HR team handled millions of routine employee requests a year, such as questions on benefits, payroll and careers. Answering them by hand took HR staff time away from more complex cases.
Approach
IBM built AskHR, an internal assistant that classifies each employee request, routes it to the right HR domain and either answers it or carries out the task. In 2025 it ran on IBM's own watsonx Orchestrate agent platform, and cases it cannot resolve go to HR staff. IBM also sells the platform to other companies.
Results
Takeaway
In 2025 IBM's chief executive said AI had taken over a couple of hundred HR employees' work while savings funded other roles and total headcount rose. IBM's 94% containment rate counts questions closed without a person and does not measure fully automated tasks.
Categories
- Size
- Large enterprise
- Industry
- Technology and telecom
- Business function
- Human resources
- Innovation type
- Process innovation
- AI technology
- AI agentsConversational and voice AI
- Adoption
- Built in-house
- Evidence
- Company's own claim
Sources
Source summaries
IBM describes AskHR, its internal HR agent running on watsonx Orchestrate. It reports a 94% containment rate for common questions, a 40% cut in HR operating costs over four years, 75% fewer support tickets since 2016, more than 2.1 million employee conversations a year and over 11.5 million interactions in 2024.
Outsource Accelerator reports, citing chief executive Arvind Krishna's interview with The Wall Street Journal, that AI agents have taken over the work of "a couple hundred" HR employees. Krishna says IBM's total employment has nonetheless grown because the savings were reinvested in software engineering, sales and marketing. Outsource Accelerator also says internal tools including AskHR automate 94% of routine HR tasks, without naming a source for that figure.
Full details are in the original sources.