How To Use Asynchronous AI Tools To Deliver a Better, More Scalable Remote Onboarding Experience

Day one for your new employees should feel exciting, not like a waste of time. Unfortunately, many businesses underestimate the importance of a great onboarding experience, especially when working with remote teams.

It ends up taking a new employee in Europe days or even weeks to fully onboard because HR and IT teams are in a different time zone, buried under a mountain of manual tickets, and still dealing with clunky manual handoffs across systems that slow everything down. 

All that early excitement and motivation stalls, along with productivity, leaving your new hire wondering if this is really the right fit.

These issues are common symptoms of outdated onboarding methods. Live training sessions and human-led handoffs worked fine when everyone was in the same office, but they break down fast in remote-first, distributed, and hybrid environments.

To build a scalable, memorable onboarding journey for your remote teams, you need asynchronous AI tools and workflows that work when and where your employees do.

Why remote onboarding is a challenge in global and hybrid workplaces

Hiring global teams can help keep your business flexible, but it also introduces new challenges. Mismatched time zones, inconsistent regional processes, and long waiting periods to get employee support all create friction and slow teams down.

These issues typically aren't as impactful in an office setting, since help is usually just a desk away. But when your workforce is spread across different time zones, the convenience of proximity disappears.

Instead of getting quick answers to onboarding questions, new remote hires get into a "hurry up and wait" cycle. Employees training on new systems on the East Coast may have to wait hours for a West Coast IT administrator to set up their software.

This not only sets the wrong tone for new hires when you're trying to build their trust, but it also severely impacts time to productivity. And while your new hire is stuck waiting for direction, support teams are working through a backlog of help tickets instead of focusing on strategy.

To break this cycle, enterprises need advanced AI solutions that eliminate the dependency on live human availability. Modern tools can deliver instant, accurate guidance across regions and automate complex workflows across HR, IT, and identity solutions, ensuring that where an employee lives won't negatively impact their onboarding journey.

How AI enables asynchronous employee onboarding

To solve the "hurry up and wait" problem, you need a process that doesn't depend on live face-to-face meetings or core business hours. Asynchronous AI employee onboarding delivers guidance, helps employees complete tasks, and provides support instantly — without needing a human to be online.

Unlike a synchronous remote onboarding approach, which typically involves in-person video conferences, phone calls, or manual workflow handoffs, asynchronous communication enables remote teams to stay independently productive.

With the right AI solutions in place, HR and IT teams can automate many onboarding workflows, including:

• Access provisioning and setting up software
• Answering common onboarding questions and providing training materials
• Providing personalized task assistance for employees based on their role

Agentic AI solutions use explicit reasoning, orchestration, and planning capabilities to take these capabilities even further. Instead of just retrieving information, AI agents can manage complex tasks across systems, empowering employees to go from asking to action, without compromising your governance policies.

Support time-zone independence and global teams

The larger and more distributed your teams, the more you'll need to provide time-zone independence. If you have remote teams spread around the world, a single support window will create bottlenecks.

When you use AI to help streamline asynchronous onboarding, your teams no longer need to rely on HR or IT availability. New employees can get answers on their own, right when they need them, and onboard at their own pace.

AI also helps reduce language barriers that can hinder accessibility for your international hires. With built-in multilingual capabilities, these tools deliver clear, understandable instructions to every employee and provide real-time assistance within the applications they already use, such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, and web portals.

Enabling these features in your onboarding workflows helps you increase employee engagement rates, improve staff retention, and enhance overall support — without increasing your headcount.

Improve employee experiences with scalable, self-guided onboarding

AI helps drive self-assurance by reducing uncertainty in onboarding tasks and providing new team members with real-time, scalable support. Any time you hire a new employee, the quicker you can build their confidence, the better. AI ensures every employee has a consistent, open channel of communication whenever they need it, so they're never left waiting for an answer. 

With an agentic AI solution in place, you can take these onboarding experiences even further by automatically: 

• Scheduling regular check-ins
• Provisioning access to necessary tools
• Setting up new training modules as the employee progresses

When you have an AI solution in place that can actually act on behalf of the user, with minimal human intervention, onboarding becomes a seamless, structured experience that ensures nothing slips through the cracks.

Minimize manual work for HR, IT, and people ops teams

While efficient onboarding is important for your new employees, it's also beneficial to your current teams. AI solutions can connect your HRIS, ITSM, IAM, and collaboration tools together to create a functional, automated ecosystem.

With this system in place, your teams can offload repetitive tasks like software provisioning, benefits administration, or access changes to intelligent AI agents. This reduces unnecessary ticket volume and back-and-forth clarifications, allowing HR and IT teams to focus on higher-value tasks.

AI tools can also provide HR teams with actionable insights into their remote workforce. They can pinpoint where new hires often get stuck in a workflow or frequently have questions, enabling quick intervention and process improvements.

Key onboarding workflows to automate

While there are many onboarding workflows you can automate with AI, it's essential to focus on your highest-friction points first. Below are four critical workflows worth automating.

Device provisioning and access

AI can help your new hires get up to speed fast by automatically handling access provisioning. Unlike traditional onboarding, which requires human-to-human coordination between HR and IT, AI can orchestrate identity and access provisioning workflows through connected IAM systems (Okta, Azure AD, etc.) and take action across systems:

• Granting application access
• Triggering approval workflows
• Automatically resolving common provisioning errors while escalating exceptions to IT

Effective automation reduces those first-week IT ticket volumes and ensures remote workers have all the resources they need to succeed from the very first day. 

With this flexibility, you no longer have to align your hiring protocols with your IT team's scheduling availability. Provisioning can happen instantly, giving new employees the runway they need to progress.

See the top AI tools for orchestrating end-to-end provisioning across your entire workforce.

Benefits enrollment and HR policy orientation

Eighty-one percent of employees report feeling overwhelmed by the amount of information they get during the onboarding process. But AI can simplify some of the chaos in benefits enrollment and region-specific policy orientation by instantly directing users to the correct portals and providing clear, personalized steps they can follow.

Instead of combing through a company's knowledge base, remote employees can use intelligent search features to get immediate answers about their coverage, deadlines, and eligibility details.

Security and compliance training

If your business is subject to strict regulatory requirements, this automation is critical for ensuring strict compliance across all your distributed teams. 

But chasing down all your employees to finalize security and compliance training is a drain on resources. AI can help deliver mandatory training modules, track completion, and send automated reminders, so HR managers don't have to.

By sending timely nudges to remote employees to sign policy documents or complete role-specific certifications, AI can keep workflows moving and make sure nothing gets overlooked during onboarding. 

Workspace, culture, and team orientation

One of the biggest challenges in remote workforces is isolation. When your teams are physically separated, it's hard to keep the company culture aligned.

AI can help by providing localized onboarding content — from team norms to communication channels, org charts, and key contacts — tailored to each employee's role, seniority, and more.

Instead of reading through lengthy manuals that may not be relevant to them, new hires can quickly get up to speed on the specific expectations of their role and the resources that matter most to their department. This gives your business the speed and efficiency needed to integrate new employees into the company culture as you scale.

Getting started with AI-powered remote onboarding

Asynchronous AI tools can completely transform your onboarding process, but it's important to follow best practices for the biggest impact and ROI. Below are three practical strategies you can apply as you get started with AI-powered remote onboarding.

Choose tools powered by agentic AI

When looking for an AI-powered onboarding tool, don't settle for simple chatbot features. Look for an agentic AI solution that's capable of reasoning, planning, and completing multi-step tasks across your HR, IT, IAM, and collaboration systems.

Remember that your new employees often need more than just their questions answered. They also need help: 

• Provisioning systems
• Getting approvals
• Requesting equipment
• Completing onboarding tasks

Point solutions or form-based tools inevitably require manual intervention. Agentic AI can orchestrate these workflows automatically, giving every employee a seamless onboarding experience.

Get leadership buy-in

To make your AI investments successful, it's important to gain leadership buy-in. But this doesn't mean simply asking for budget. You'll need to show how AI-powered onboarding contributes to the measurable metrics that business leaders care about:

• Faster time to productivity: AI enables you to deliver an efficient and effective onboarding process that gets every new hire up to speed quicker.
• Improved retention: When you can wow new hires with a great onboarding experience right from the start, you build confidence that they've found the right role.
• Global consistency: AI delivers the same accurate, personalized experience to every employee, no matter where they're located.
• Reduced ticket volume: When employees throughout the org can self-service on demand, support teams can finally crawl out from under the ticket backlog and focus on the initiatives that move the needle.

Connect these benefits to the hidden costs of manual workflows — the lost time, delayed provisioning, and employee frustration that drag down overall efficiency.

This is exactly where AI shines, delivering the consistent yet personalized experiences that eliminate operational friction and boost productivity across the board.

Start with high-impact, low-lift workflows

As much as you might want to, avoid the temptation to automate every process right out of the gate. The better approach is to focus on high-impact, low-lift workflows to generate momentum with some quick wins.

Start with the manual tasks that consistently block new hires:

• Device provisioning
• Account setups
• Access requests
• Mandatory policy acknowledgments

By automating these high-friction, multi-system processes using an agentic AI platform like Moveworks, you can significantly reduce first-week delays and ticket volume. Leverage this early success to shape a long-term, scalable onboarding automation strategy that gradually expands use cases across the business. 

Empower seamless onboarding for global teams with Moveworks

A distributed workforce can help your business scale effectively while keeping your operating expenses in check. But supporting your remote teams takes more than the standard onboarding playbook. 

Agentic AI platforms like Moveworks can help enterprises better support global teams by coordinating onboarding workflows across regions and time zones. 

Designed with enterprise complexity in mind, Moveworks is an agentic AI platform built to help your organization create scalable, automated onboarding and support experiences for global teams. Through a single platform, employees can get instant answers, complete multi-step tasks, and initiate approval workflows across systems — all within existing enterprise permissions and policies.

Moveworks integrates seamlessly with your existing HRIS, ITSM, and IAM solutions to automate workflows and enable on-demand self-service, whenever and wherever your employees work from. 

Moveworks gives global teams access to transformative agentic AI tools, including:

• An agentic, conversational AI Assistant that helps surface relevant information and guide employees through tasks, reducing the need to manually search across tools.
• Employee Experience Insights provides usage details to HR and IT teams, helping them identify potential areas of improvement in the onboarding and support experiences.
• Agent Studio offers a low-code enterprise way to build and deploy custom automations across your enterprise tech stack using your own unique business logic.

Unlike basic chatbots that hit a wall when complicated, multi-step requests, Moveworks uses enterprise-grade orchestration to reason across systems and act within defined workflows and approvals. Your remote teams get the proactive onboarding support they need from day one, without overburdening your HR and IT teams. 

Ready for onboarding that actually works for your distributed teams? Schedule your free Moveworks demo today.