Coles Group to test agentic AI on staff leave booking

Coles Group is working on an agentic AI use case that will be able to handle leave booking for the retailer’s 120,000 team members.

Caroline O'Brien, Coles Group, left, speaks in a Microsoft-run session at SAP NOW AI Tour in Melbourne.

Months ago, the retailer launched a “generative AI-enabled knowledge assistant” on its mycoles staff portal - called mycoles Assistant - that is designed to answer people and culture and mycoles questions.

Speaking at a SAP NOW AI Tour event in Melbourne, general manager of data and intelligence Caroline O’Brien said the assistant “traverses a SharePoint of policy documentation related to Coles employees and surfaces a response.”

A video shows the AI assistant can link staff to relevant forms and steps they need to go through to put in a leave request, “instead of waiting to speak to [a] line manager”.

O’Brien said that in the months since the AI assistant went live, “It’s reduced portal queries to our people and culture team by 85 percent and scored very well in terms of satisfaction.”

But the retailer already has plans to “evolve” the assistant so it can take actions as well, not just surface information.

“What we’d like to be able to do now is evolve that mycoles Assistant to take broader actions, and that’s where SAP and other systems come into play,” O’Brien said.

“How do we turn our GenAI-enabled platform and knowledge assistant into a goal orientated, action taking agent is the uplift that we’re building right now.

“Supporting that agentic evolution - beyond just coming back with knowledge responses and actually taking actions - is where our focus is next.”

The agent, O’Brien said, would be able to check the staffer’s leave balance, for example, to better tailor its response.

This will require integrations, at minimum, between Microsoft and SAP.

“We’re working with SAP and our architecture team here [at Coles] to try to figure out how we optimally have these agents work together to achieve the task of booking leave,” O’Brien said.

“We’re working through the use case now.”

O’Brien said there are also other applications of agentic AI being contemplated at Coles.

However, she noted that agentic AI is not the only type of AI that Coles will seek to harness to provide value to employees.

Employees would benefit from custom agents designed to help them with specific tasks.

But they will also be given “AI productivity tools … to see what happens and how they do their jobs differently.”

“I really do believe that if you put AI productivity tools in the hands of some of our team members that are walking around the stores, we just might realise they might do their job completely differently in future,” O’Brien said.