Orica builds a conversational AI assistant for HR

Orica has built a conversational AI assistant as an overlay for its HR systems estate, with its North American operations the first to benefit from the tool.

Global process strategy and enablement manager Leo Luk told the ServiceNow AI Summit Melbourne that the company has “eight business-facing interfaces for all things HR, which is probably six or seven too many for our liking.”

“At the moment, even if managers and employees understand where to go for their specific needs, the system is not quite set up in a way that's user-friendly enough,” Luk said.

He added that the setup was inefficient for HR to support requests for information or certain HR activities.

The response is two “complementary” pieces of AI: a conversational AI overlay built with MoveWorks, which ServiceNow acquired last year, and Now Assist in the core ServiceNow platform, which supports “fulfillers” working in the backend.

Fulfillers are what ServiceNow calls users of its software that have full administrative rights.

ServiceNow acts as a case management and workflow engine at Orica. The company's HR systems of record include SAP SuccessFactors and Dayforce, as well as other systems.

“MoveWorks … sits on top of [those systems, and] integrates with and uses orchestration from those underlying systems such as ServiceNow to actually push and pull data across the enterprise,” Deloitte technology and transformation partner Dough Schairer said.

Deloitte is involved in all of Orica’s work with ServiceNow.

Luk said that the requirements for the conversational AI assistant were an “ability to perform process orchestration and talk to our key core HR systems; the ability to be able to process natural language” and “be multilingual because of our global footprint; and very importantly, it needs to be accessible via [Microsoft] Teams because we need to minimise the barrier of entry to HR services as much as possible.”

After running a proof-of-concept, the AI assistant was implemented first for Orica’s North American operations.

Luk said that a series of “common HR use cases” had been selected to prove the conversational AI assistant’s value.

“A couple of flagship use cases are processes in SuccessFactors at the moment, like position creation and approval, [and] requisition creation and approval,” he said.

“You're actually looking at more than 30 fields to be populated on those forms in SuccessFactors currently. 

“Some other [use cases] include leave applications, leave approval, as well as retrieving leave balances as well. Those are just high volume ‘no-brainers’ to us.

“We've got some really key high-value, high-volume use cases spanning across four of our major HR systems in the form of SuccessFactors, ServiceNow, Dayforce, as well as Microsoft SharePoint.

“If we get this part right, [and] we implement this successful launch for these use cases, then we can shift gears pretty quickly and think about how we scale the solution more broadly across the organisation.”