As AI permeates all aspects of corporate people ops, HR leaders are grappling with the possibility of delegating to agents even the most harrowingly human aspects of their jobs—namely, responding to workplace misconduct, harassment, and discrimination reports from employees.

But this is not purely a human-versus-machine issue; it’s fraught for the software companies that engineer HR agents, too, as they test new boundaries with agents that can direct employees to human HR representatives in response to misconduct complaints, or “empathize” with them and gather information about the reported incident.

Morning Brew spoke with five HR-specific autonomous agent providers to elucidate how AI is being deployed at different stages in the misconduct reporting and investigation process. Proponents of the tech argue that reporting incidents to AI can ensure the misconduct complaint is handled in a uniform way and can further encourage reporting. On the flip side, one workplace AI company we spoke with said it wouldn’t use agents for such a thing, because when it comes to workplace misconduct, people want to speak with a human.

And beyond the human element, there’s a legal one: Employers that deploy AI for misconduct reporting can encounter significant liability risks and potentially undermine the severity of a complaint by asking employees to report painful incidents to a non-human entity, attorneys told us.

Agentic colleagues

Beyond answering questions about company policy and autonomously handling admin work, some HR agents can respond to reports of workplace misconduct in more nuanced ways. Harper, an agent created by HR platform Wisq, is “a representative of HR” that can escalate initial complaints to humans, per the company’s head of product, Clayton Holz. He told Morning Brew that workplace misconduct reporting is “actually a good use case for AI” because it can be more uniformly trained than humans.

“If you think about having maybe 50 different folks in the HR department who could be doing these interviews, they’re on site, there’s turnover in this role, they don’t have a lot of experience doing it,” Holz said. “The consistency of AI, as well as the fact that everything’s well documented, it could be net beneficial.”

Holz said he thinks AI could create plans for evaluating complaints and even executing parts of the investigation. (While these aren’t functionalities Harper currently has, Holz said some clients are asking for them.) Giving agents more responsibility in this process could trigger pushback and concerns about AI bias, but Harper has gone through bias testing, Holz said, and even escalates complaints to humans more often than might be necessary.

“We have a dedicated [AI] model that is trained on tens of thousands of examples to specifically pluck [misconduct reports] out, and then say, ‘I need to pass this on to my colleague,’” Holz said, adding that Harper has a “bias toward false positives and not false negatives. No AI model is perfect, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you.”

Making sure that agents are role-specific helps them stay on track, too. Lattice Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer Barbra Gago told Morning Brew in a statement that though the company’s HR-specific AI agent isn’t currently “detecting or autonomously escalating employee misconduct,” “companies benefit from using purpose-built enterprise AI” rather than a “general-purpose assistant.”

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