Employee onboarding with an AI assistant: answers for newcomers from company documents

The first weeks in a new job are a string of small questions. How do I request leave? Where are the current staff regulations? Which instruction covers accepting a return in our department? The answers usually exist, because someone once wrote them down in the company's documents. But a newcomer does not yet know what those documents are called or where to look for them. Well-planned employee onboarding shortens that path: instead of guessing, the new person asks and gets an answer based on the document that applies today.

Today they mostly ask colleagues. The onboarding buddy explains the same thing once again, sometimes from memory, following a procedure that is two editions out of date. This post is part of our series "The AI-assisted archive in practice". How the AI assistant connects to the archive and how it is secured is explained in our post on AI document search. Here we look at one use: knowledge for a new employee.

The knowledge a newcomer needs is already in the archive

In CONTMAN Archive, every document belongs to a category, and every category has fields that your company defines. Policies, procedures and work instructions might have fields such as "Department", "Valid from" and "Process owner". A few parts of this setup matter especially for onboarding.

Descriptions written for people and for the assistant

Every category and every field can have a description of up to 2,000 characters. It is read by the people who add documents, and also by the AI assistant: it starts from the list of categories the person may read, together with their fields and descriptions. So it pays to explain in plain words what a category is for, for example: "Customer service procedures. The Department field says who the procedure applies to."

One procedure, many editions

A new edition of a policy does not have to be a new file next to the old one. In CONTMAN it is the next version of the same document's file. Versions are numbered and cannot be changed, and every earlier one can be viewed and downloaded. The assistant reads text from the current version of the file, and it can fetch an older version's file if someone asks for it. If each new edition goes into the archive as a new version, the newcomer gets an answer based on the wording in force, not on whichever copy happened to be left in another folder.

An onboarding pack without copying files

The same document can be described in several categories at once, and anyone with read access to any of them can open it. So you can create an "Onboarding pack" category and describe selected policies, procedures and instructions in it, without copying a single file. In that category and in their department's categories, a newcomer needs two permissions: document read and file download and preview. Without the second, the assistant cannot read the text of the files.

Documents that belong together

A procedure usually comes with its own form and its own instruction. When your company marks a field, for example "Process", as one that links documents, all documents with the same value in that field become related. The assistant can fetch them together, so a question about a business trip leads to the procedure, the request form and the expenses instruction at once.

Employee onboarding with an AI assistant: sample questions

Marta is starting in customer service. In her first week she might ask the assistant:

• "How do we request leave here? Tell me which document your answer is based on."
• "What is the current version of the staff regulations, and what does it say about remote work?"
• "Which procedures have customer service in the Department field?"
• "Show me the documents related to the business travel expenses procedure."
• "Summarise the instruction for accepting a return in five steps."

Her onboarding buddy, who is putting the pack together, would rather ask: "Which documents in the Onboarding pack category have no value in the Process owner field?" The assistant can handle both kinds of question, because it searches for a phrase in document descriptions and file content and narrows the results with filters on fields, including one that finds empty values. Marta is a made-up character for this example, and so are the category and field names.

Answers only from what the newcomer may read

A new employee should not see everything on day one, and the assistant will not show it to them. Four rules matter most during onboarding:

• The role sets the limits. Permissions are granted in roles, separately for each category. The assistant sees only what the person who connected it is allowed to see. If the newcomer needs to read more, an administrator has to give them the right role; the assistant cannot get around that.
• Buddies first, newcomers next. The assistant starts switched off, and nobody uses it until an administrator adds that permission to their role. So you can give it to the onboarding buddies first and to newcomers as a second step.
• Employee files are a separate matter. The assistant browses employee files in CONTMAN HR only if your organisation uses the employee files module and the person has a separate permission for it. A newcomer asking about procedures usually does not need it.
• Content goes to your company's model. Every passage the assistant reads is sent to the AI model your company works with. So for the onboarding pack, choose documents that are meant for new starters anyway.

How to get started

1. Pick the documents newcomers ask about most. Check that their current edition sits in the archive as the latest version of the file, not as a separate document next to the old one.
2. Describe your categories and fields. A few sentences in a category description help people and the assistant find their way. It is worth making the "Valid from" field required. We cover required fields in our post on keeping documents in order.
3. Create an "Onboarding pack" category. Describe the chosen documents in it and give newcomers document read and file download and preview in that category.
4. Check content reading. The assistant searches file content only in categories where content processing is switched on. Scanned policies only become searchable once OCR is switched on; it starts switched off.
5. Grant the permission and connect the assistant. An administrator grants the assistant permission in the roles, and the newcomer connects their assistant by signing in with their own account. The server address is on the screen for connecting an AI assistant, in the account menu.

Coming soon: the CONTMAN Assistant inside the archive

In the next version, a newcomer will put the same question to the CONTMAN Assistant, built into the archive. Next to the answer they will see numbered references to the documents it rests on, and a source card will take them to the right document in one click. They gain twice: they have the answer, and they know where in the archive to look next time.

Onboarding new people is a good first project for an archive with an AI assistant, because the documents it needs usually exist already. Book a demo, and we will show you how the assistant answers a new employee's questions using documents similar to yours.