How Genpact is Revolutionizing HR through AI

Which came first—the chicken or the egg? That’s the question on the minds of many HR leaders seeking the best way to integrate AI technology into their workstreams.

But the most successful leaders who utilize AI know that identifying a business problem should always come first. Global professional services company Genpact is one such organization that has mastered the art of pinpointing its stickiest HR issues and coming up with creative AI solutions.

Most recently, Genpact’s HR tech team took on the challenge of creating a better process for retrieving and disseminating HR-related information for its 127,000-person organization employing people in 33 countries.

Like many large organizations, Genpact struggled with the pain points of connecting dispersed groups of employees with accurate historic, regional, and company-specific policies and guidelines. HR information was scattered across team members, difficult to locate, and oftentimes inconsistent in accuracy depending on the region employees were inquiring from or about.

The solution: A small group of technologists at the company created their own generative AI platform called HRpedia that combs through the vast collective of Genpact’s internal HR resources to answer personnel-related questions in real time. It’s a solution that allows the company’s employees to safely experiment and gain confidence in adopting generative AI, while also taking a major stressor off the HR team.

According to the Institute for Corporate Productivity’s (i4cp) report, Is HR Already Behind in the AI Revolution? some of the most successful and innovative organizations employ a series of next practices to achieve such efforts. Two such practices include defining business cases (i.e., problems to solve or opportunities to capitalize on) for the use of AI, and providing a secure environment for experimentation among employees.

A next practice is defined by i4cp as one that analysis shows strong positive correlation to bottom-line business impact but is not yet widely adopted.

Genpact’s efforts clearly illustrate such tactics used by high-performance organizations—those excelling in revenue, market share, profitability, and customer satisfaction over a five-year period.

Praful Tickoo, the company’s talent analytics lead, spoke with i4cp about how the next practices helped his team create an effective tool for all employees.

Starting with the business case

Research by i4cp found that some of the most effective organizations utilizing AI identify how to leverage it as an everyday productivity tool. Fifty-three percent of AI Innovators report that they define business cases for leveraging generative AI within their organizations—a practice Genpact has employed for years.

AI Innovators are defined by i4cp as organizations that are further along in the successful implementation of AI tools across the enterprise and in HR.

Like other organizations, Genpact has utilized AI for many years. Though it has taken the integration of the burgeoning technology one step further than most—the company’s leadership established a machine learning and AI team within its HR practice eight years ago, signaling that they saw the technology as an integral part of the future of HR.

“For us, AI in HR is not a new concept. It's a relatively well-established team [and] concept that’s well embedded in the ways of working,” explained Tickoo.

Genpact has been using three unique AI tools for employees: an AI-powered chatbot named Amber to monitor employee engagement; Genome, the company’s learning platform which utilizes AI to suggest learning paths and refresh learning content for employees; and, most recently, its generative AI platform HRpedia.

How HRpedia works 

HRpedia launched in March 2024 to Genpact’s India-based HR group before rolling out to the full 1,500-person global HR team in June. The platform is Genpact’s internal take on ChatGPT. HRpedia—much like an encyclopedia—references all the internal knowledge and information an employee could need in their lifetime at the company.

The platform pulls from proprietary information across the organization in addition to the wider internet. Employees are encouraged to ask HRpedia questions ranging from compensation and performance management to corporate policies and career development guidance.

The platform delivers geo-specific responses based on where the inquiring employee is based to reflect the global nature of the company. The goal, said Tickoo, is personalization.

Tickoo offered an example of leadership development to best depict HRpedia’s capabilities. He wants employees to ask questions like, “What are the traits that will make me successful at Genpact?”

While ChatGPT might give a relevant high-level answer to this question, HRpedia has been taught to answer the question as if the person were asking a senior HR leader at Genpact.

“It will talk our language, it will talk our tools, it will talk our processes, it will talk our ways of working,” explained Tickoo. His team made a concerted effort to teach the platform how to respond in alignment with the organization’s cultural framework—referred to as CI²—which the company defines as being curious, incisive, and courageous, while championing integrity and inclusivity.

The platform also provides suggestions for related courses and learning pathways from its internal learning platform Genome as part of its response. “We want this to be first line of defense, the first shoulder to lean on, [and] the first sounding board for our employees on many things,” shared Tickoo.

Providing an effective and secure environment for experimentation

Beyond teaching employees how to use and adopt generative AI, HRpedia has had to do a lot of learning as well. One of the greatest challenges Tickoo and his team had to solve was teaching the program Genpact’s specific language. Otherwise, its answers for HR leaders would lack accuracy and relevance. The team quickly learned that it needed to educate the platform of company-specific acronyms and the language surrounding the company’s hierarchical bands so that it would present correct information to various levels of employees.

Additionally, Tickoo’s team examined what organizational policies and tacit knowledge they needed to transmit that was not necessarily documented anywhere. There is always a certain degree of information within a company that is gleaned simply by virtue of interacting with others, he said.

Tickoo shared that his primary goal and measure for success at this point is simply increasing the number of unique users among the global HR team. In August, the team plans to roll HRpedia out to the entire organization, and eventually, HRpedia will replace the traditional ticketing system used by employees to flag issues and inquiries to the HR team.

Tickoo also views HRpedia as one day becoming a solution to closing the knowledge gap between new and tenured employees. This can aid new employees (and those moving into new roles internally) to become productive more quickly, which can also aid in their engagement and retention.

The earnings

Tickoo and his team are measuring success of the tool by monitoring unique users and internal feedback. Among its 1,500 HR employees to whom the platform has been made available, more than 400 are unique users. The team has also incorporated a basic thumbs up and thumbs down feedback option to gauge the accuracy and helpfulness of the responses. The tool also hosts a suggestion box for more detailed feedback.

Once the number of unique users stabilizes, Tickoo plans to set more key performance indicators related to repeat users. “As we learn more, we may develop more KPIs which we may not have thought of today and then measure ourselves on those,” said Tickoo. He and his team prioritize a growth mindset when it comes to developing new tools and strategies.

“If you were to ask me, ‘Praful, have you cracked the code on leveraging technologies, AI in HR, etc.?’ My answer is, we are still students and still learning every day,” he said. “Even after doing this for the last eight years.”

Additional Resources:

Learn more about how Genpact is creating a learning culture to drive employees demand for AI upskilling.