An AI HR Agent That Gave the People & Culture Team Their Time Back

At a 15–20 person company, HR should be simple. But "simple" doesn't mean frictionless. At TechCare, the People & Culture team was spending a significant chunk of every workweek answering the same five questions on Slack: What's my leave balance? Has my request been approved? Did my check-in go through?

The answers were always in the system. The problem was access, or rather the lack of it. Employees had no way to check their own data without messaging HR directly. Attendance was tracked manually, and leave approvals occasionally fell through the cracks when a manager had competing priorities.

The result was an estimated 8–12 hours of HR admin per week that required no human judgment, just time.

TechCare had tried existing HR platforms, including Zoho. The integrations were limited, the workflows didn't match how a lean hybrid-remote team actually operated, and the team kept falling back on spreadsheets and direct messages to fill the gaps. Off-the-shelf solutions also came with enterprise-scale complexity that a team of 15–20 people simply didn't need.

The decision to build in-house was not about cost alone. It was about control — over the logic, the tone, the data, and the ability to evolve the tool as the company grows.

Cleo is TechCare's in-house AI HR agent, deployed on Slack and configurable for Telegram or any other preferred messaging stack. It was built by the TechCare team using a custom pipeline on top of FastAPI and LangChain, with a model-agnostic inference engine that runs across multiple LLM providers with a built-in fallback system.

At its core, Cleo uses a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture, meaning every answer it gives is grounded in TechCare's own HR data, policy documents, and real-time database connections — not hallucinated from general knowledge. When Cleo cannot answer with sufficient confidence, a threshold mechanism triggers human-in-the-loop (HITL) escalation, automatically pulling in the HR admin.

From idea to beta-tested working prototype: less than one week.

The internal processing logic — how Cleo understands, routes, and responds to queries — is proprietary IP and not disclosed publicly. What TechCare can confirm is that the system includes fine-tunable skills, an evolving feedback loop for continuous reasoning improvement, and security guardrails built into the architecture from the ground up.

TechCare plans to include a Cleo-specific question in the next employee engagement survey to formalise satisfaction data. Informal feedback to date has been consistently positive, particularly around the elimination of the back-and-forth employees previously needed just to check routine information.

Cleo was never designed to replace HR teams. It was designed to remove the repetitive operational burden that prevents HR professionals from focusing on people. The result is not just faster workflows — it is a better employee experience, a more scalable operation, and a glimpse into how internal AI systems will quietly reshape the future of work.