This week, we launched our Smarter Onboarding with Rovo webinar, designed to help HR teams facing common onboarding challenges.
Now, we’re excited to share some of the key takeaways and highlights with you all.
Why did we choose onboarding and Rovo?
We knew that for HR teams, onboarding can be a real burden. It’s an essential process to get right – it’s the first touchpoint a new starter may have with your organisation – but it is often littered with repetitive actions, manual tasks, and inconsistencies.
Research shows that it only 12% of employees feel they’ve been onboarded effectively,* whilst another report found that it take an average of 8 months for new hires to become fully productive.**
This is where an AI-powered automations can truly make an impact.
We built a custom Atlassian Rovo agent – the Confluence Onboarding Helper – to tackle some of the core challenges facing HR teams and their new starters.
From information overwhelm to siloed knowledge, here’s how the Confluence Onboarding Helper Rovo agent makes light work of onboarding actions.
What does the Onboarding Helper Rovo agent do?
For a full demo of the Onboarding Helper Rovo agent, do take a look at the webinar recording. Seeing it in action is impressive, and truly demonstrates what a difference it can make to busy HR teams.
In the meantime, here are some key highlights:
The agent answers new starter questions
The Confluence Onboarding Helper does all the heavy lifting when it comes to sourcing relevant information and sharing knowledge with your new starters.
Instead of your HR team having to field numerous questions (and often similar ones, if you have multiple new starters joining at once, your new hire can simply ask the Onboarding Helper Rovo agent.
This saves you time and provides a better experience for the onboardee, as they instantly get the answers they need (without worrying about bombarding HR!).
Sources knowledge
Now, how does the agent answer those new starter questions? Easy. It instantly parses all your company documentation to provide relevant answers – saving your team the job of reviewing multiple policies across different spaces and business areas.
Using the agent can also be a safeguard against missing information. When your new hire asks a question, the Onboarding Helper will look through every piece of accessible documentation, which means it can return guidance that may otherwise have been hidden in more obscure or older policies, and overlooked by someone manually searching.
The Onboarding Helper is team-specific. This means that, alongside general HR documentation, it will search for data in the new starter’s relevant team space as well.
No stone is left unturned with the custom Onboarding Helper AI agent.
Would you like to create and deploy an AI agent like our custom Onboarding Helper? Or has this article sparked a new idea for an agent that would work for your team? If you need support developing a custom Rovo agent, from solution design to managing integrations, we can help.
Shares knowledge
The aim of this Rovo agent is to make life as easy possible for your new hires. So, rather than returning a knowledge dump of all the information its gathered, the Onboarding Helper instead summarises the key points, and then links to the full policy document for deeper reading.
Generates a checklist
Once the Onboarding Helper has provided the answer to a question, it can generate a checklist based on any actions the new starter has to complete (if, for example, they asked the agent how to get set up with remote working). Your new hire can then save this checklist in the personal Confluence space so they can work through it.
Raises a request with IT
Let’s say one of those checklist items requires your onboardee to contact IT. This may be both daunting and inaccessible – how do they do that? The Onboarding Helper Rovo agent knows how (of course!).
Your new starter can ask Rovo to contact IT, and the agent will instantly create a ticket and post it to the IT Team, using the Rovo-Confluence-JSM integration. The onboardee doesn’t even need to leave Rovo for this all to happen – quickly and seamlessly.
Books a meeting
Your new starter needs to meet their onboarding buddy for an induction chat. Now, the Onboarding Helper Rovo agent has (naturally) already shared who their buddy is, and what their role, reporting line and function is in the company.
It can also book a meeting for both parties. We designed the custom Onboarding Helper agent to integrate with calendar tools (such as Google Calendar or Outlook), so it can check the new starter and their buddy’s availability, book an available slot, generate a meeting invite and send to both over email.
Previously an HR team member would have had to go back and forth between diaries. Now, Rovo completes the task it in a matter of moments.
Ultimately, the Onboarding Helper agent – like all Rovo agents – can connect to every source of your enterprise knowledge and automate actions instantly, making tasks simpler, easier and faster for new hires and HR bodies.
Discover the impact that AI automations and agents can have on your work, by developing a custom solution in Atlassian Forge. Enabling an additional layer of complexity and capability, we can guide you through the development process, ensuring you benefit from a truly unique solution designed for your teams’ needs.
What other agents are there?
Following the demo of our custom Confluence Onboarding Helper AI agent, we welcomed Sebastian Rudolph from Atlassian, to shine a light on other available Rovo agents.
The Atlassian Cloud Platform currently includes 21 out-of-the-box (ootb) Rovo agents, and there a number of Partner agents available on the Atlassian Marketplace (including Captionizer, the newest addition to our AppFox colleagues’ portfolio).
There are also almost limitless opportunities to create custom agents using natural language prompts with Rovo Studio. For teams seeking more complex solutions, meanwhile, you can code agents using Atlassian’s development platform, Forge.
In terms of integrations, Atlassian supports 50+ ootb connectors. Alongside these, you can integrate Rovo agents with any third-party platforms that have an open API.
What impact is Rovo making?
‘Rovo is rescuing us from the drudgery of monotonous tasks’ – Sebastian Rudolph, Senior Solutions Engineer at Atlassian
Atlassian’s stats on adoption are already significant and impressive. Over 100,000 Atlassian customer workflows have already incorporated agents, and that number is continuing to grow.
On the webinar, Sebastian shared that Atlassian’s own ootb Onboarding Buddy agent answered c. 2000 questions for 70% of the company’s hires, whilst its PR Generator agent automated 80% of routine dev tasks for one of Atlassian’s software development teams.
Sebastian also touched on Rovo agents built in tandem with Atlassian partners, such as an emerging agent in development with Databricks, which aims to make querying your datasets far easier.
The message is compelling: Rovo agents is an area rich with possibility – and we expect it to grow significantly over the coming months, with more partner collaborations, more and more connectors, and increasing scope to experiment and tailor your own custom AI workflows and automations.
Ready to see Rovo in action?
It’s not too late for you to catch up! The Smarter Onboarding with Rovo webinar is available for your teams to watch on-demand.
Share with your teams to discover how you can overcome onboarding overwhelm, provide a better experience for your new hires, and automate manual tasks with powerful AI agents.
