How to Reduce Manual Steps in Employee Onboarding with AI-Powered Self-Service

It's your new hire's first day. They're excited, energized, and ready to contribute. But within hours… that momentum stalls.

Their laptop hasn't arrived. They're locked out of the systems they need to use. And no one seems to know whether it’s IT or human resources who should fix it.

This is as frustrating for the employee as it is costly for the organization: One report found that poor onboarding experience contributes to poor satisfaction and turnover. When new hires spend their first week chasing access instead of ramping up, everyone loses.

Manual processes are a major culprit. Tickets, approvals, emails, and handoffs can create delays that slow employees down and overwhelm support teams. These workflows also don't scale, especially as hiring volumes increase or teams go hybrid.

AI-powered self-service can help reduce existing manual steps by automating routine tasks, delivering instant answers, and orchestrating workflows across your HR and IT systems. This helps new hires get what they need on their start date, without waiting on tickets or navigating disconnected tools.

The hidden cost of inefficient employee onboarding

Manual onboarding has the potential to create bottlenecks at every turn. Account setup, policy acknowledgments, equipment requests, and benefits questions all require approvals, ticket queues, and cross-team handoffs. 

Each delay frustrates new hires and drains resources from HR teams and IT with unnecessary busywork.

Think about what happens when a new employee (maybe you’ve even experienced this first-hand) needs system access. They submit a ticket to IT. IT routes it to their manager for approval. The manager forwards it to HR to verify the role. HR confirms with IT. Days later, the access gets provisioned, assuming nothing falls through the cracks.

New hires perceive your company's digital maturity and whether they feel supported from their first day. And first impressions go a long way. When employees can't get answers or access quickly, confidence can drop and engagement may suffer. So much so that new employees decide in 44 days on average whether they’ll commit to a new company.

The impact can get worse as you scale. Manual employee onboarding processes that work for a handful of hires per month may break down at 50. Time zones, language barriers, and regional policy differences might make it hard for teams that operate globally, while hybrid environments can make it harder to track down who needs what and when.

Here's what this inefficiency can end up costing you:

• Stunted early productivity: New hires spend their first weeks waiting instead of working.
• Increased HR and IT workload: Support teams repeatedly answer the same questions, pulling focus from strategic work.
• Higher support volume: Confusion and delays generate follow-up tickets that could have been avoided.
• Lower team member engagement and retention: Poor onboarding experiences has the potential to increase the likelihood that new hires will leave within their first year.

Rather than being one broken task, the problem is that your HR and IT systems don't talk to each other. Someone has to manually coordinate everything, which can create hurdles to jump at every step. You need an approach that removes manual work entirely, not one that just makes it slightly faster or only automates select steps.

How AI improves the employee onboarding experience

AI-powered solutions can speed things up by removing manual work and keep processes consistent. When AI connects across your systems, it can:

• Answer questions instantly.
• Show you where new hires are getting stuck.
• Take action without anyone needing to submit a ticket.

This is where agentic AI comes in. Unlike rule-based workflow automation or integration platform as a service (iPaaS) tools that handle isolated tasks, agentic AI can do more than automate repetitive tasks. When embedded into conversational AI tools, agentic AI is able to use areasoning to interpret what employees need, decide the best course of action, and complete certain administrative tasks by integrating directly with your enterprise tools.

For example, when a new hire asks, "How do I access the VPN?", agentic AI doesn't just surface a (potentially) helpful article. It can also 

• Check the employee's permissions
• Verify access through your identity management system
• Deliver a setup guide
• Track setup status through completion

Now, instead of employees jumping through multiple portals or submitting separate tickets to IT and HR, AI can handle the coordination automatically. Everything happens in one place, through one conversational interface like Slack or Teams.

This ultimately means less waiting, fewer tickets, fewer systems to navigate, and fewer follow-ups. Employees can access self-service from the start, while HR and IT teams spend less time on repetitive work.

AI also has the potential to reveal where your onboarding process breaks down. It might spot patterns in what new hires ask about most, where delays happen, and what's missing. You can then fix these issues before they affect the next wave of employees, making each onboarding cohort smoother than the last.

See how employee experience insights can reveal the biggest gaps and issues during new hire onboarding.

Onboarding tasks that are ideal for automation

Certain onboarding tasks are highly repetitive, time-sensitive, and follow predictable patterns, making them great candidates for automation. Automating these tasks can reduce and even eliminate manual steps for both new hires and your HR and IT teams, freeing everyone to focus on the work they were actually hired to do.

Provisioning accounts, access, and IT resources

Manual access requests can create delays as soon as they’re submitted. New employees email IT, send Slack messages, or submit tickets just to get into the tools they need. Approvals, identity checks, and system handoffs inevitably slow everything down.

Solutions automate access provisioning by integrating with identity systems and ITSM platforms. When a new hire needs access, AI grants it instantly or triggers the right workflow without creating a support ticket.

For employees, this means immediate, guided access through conversational self-service rather than waiting hours (or days) for IT to respond.

Learn more about how Moveworks handles and improves provision management.

Equipment and workplace setup

Coordinating equipment requests shouldn't require a dedicated project manager. But without visibility into where things stand, new hires end up chasing updates while IT scrambles to track down shipments.

AI can automatically create and route equipment orders, track deliveries, and answer "where's my laptop?" -type questions. Employees know what to expect and when.

Answering frequently asked questions

New hires often ask the same questions repeatedly: “How do I enroll in benefits?” “What's the PTO policy?” “Where do I find the org chart?” Answering these manually may not seem time-consuming, but that time can add up and create unnecessary ticket volume, especially during onboarding spikes.

Tools use natural language understanding (NLU) and generative reasoning to respond from your knowledge bases. Answers are immediate and relevant. And employees don't have to search through portals or email HR.

Completing HR forms and compliance tasks

Navigating multiple HR portals for onboarding forms, policy acknowledgments, or training modules can make things harder than they need to be. Unclear ownership and scattered systems lead to manual follow-ups that waste everyone's time.

Moveworks surfaces the right forms at the right time, tracks what's been completed, and automatically routes submissions. Employees don't need to hunt through portals or guess what comes next. They just follow clear, guided steps.

Watch how Procore cut HR support tickets by 20% with faster onboarding.

What an AI-powered onboarding journey looks like

AI has the potential to make the entire onboarding experience better by delivering continuous, personalized support throughout a new hire's first weeks and months.

Day one: New hires set up accounts with confidence

AI tools can kick off pre-hire tasks like account provisioning, equipment assignment, and personalized welcome emails and guidance before the first day. This is when setup steps are completed automatically, eliminating manual follow-ups.

Some AI-powered tools orchestrate workflows across HRIS, ITSM, identity management, and logistics. When a new hire walks in (or logs in), their accounts work, their equipment has arrived, and their onboarding checklist is ready for them.

Week one: Empower new employees with self-service

During the first week, employees can ask any question and get instant answers, instructions, or automated actions. Whether it's an HR question about benefits or an IT issue with software access, AI may be able to resolve it immediately.

Some AI tools can also proactively share onboarding task reminders, helpful links, org navigation tips, and next steps through timely nudges, reducing the need for manual check-ins from HR or direct managers. Every new hire can get the right resources at the right time, which provides consistency without relying on someone to manually lead them through the process.

See how self-service can support employees and reduce support load.

Month one: Cut down on follow-up questions and delays

Even after the first week, persistent onboarding questions, access issues, benefits clarifications, and manager introductions may slow down early productivity. These follow-up questions often require manual intervention from HR or IT teams.

AI can resolve these issues instantly. Automated support keeps employees moving forward interrupting busy support teams, letting them get to full productivity faster.

How to measure success when reducing manual onboarding steps

Measuring the ROI of onboarding automation requires clear metrics that show impact. These results can help you demonstrate value to leadership and identify opportunities for improvement in other areas:

• Time-to-productivity for new hires: Track how quickly employees complete onboarding tasks and start actually contributing to their teams.
• Reduction in onboarding-related HR and IT ticket volume: Measure the decrease in the same questions and access requests.
• Task completion rates for access, equipment, and compliance: Monitor whether new hires complete key tasks on time without manual follow-ups.
• Decrease in follow-up questions and escalations: Evaluate whether employees are getting the answers they need the first time, or if follow-ups are happening.
• New-hire satisfaction or onboarding experience signals: Use surveys or feedback tools to gauge how new employees feel about their onboarding journey.

These metrics can prove the value of your automation investment by connecting it to real business outcomes, such as new hires contributing faster, your support teams handling fewer tickets, and employees just feeling better about joining your company.

Best practices for AI-powered onboarding processes

When implementing AI-powered onboarding, start with high-volume manual tasks that create the most issues for your team. Do this by mapping dependencies across HR, IT, and other teams to understand where handoffs slow things down. Then identify which systems need to integrate (HRIS, ITSM, identity management, collaboration tools) and prioritize the connections that will deliver the most value.

Start with a pilot initiative or use case to test workflows and gather feedback before rolling out across the company. This phase helps you assess whether you're ready. 

• Is your knowledge base accurate and complete enough for AI to pull from? 
• Are your processes consistent across different regions and roles? 
• Can your current HR and IT workflows handle automation, or do they need to be dialed in and refined a bit more first?

Focus on reducing the biggest pain points for employees. The goal is to create an experience where new hires feel supported, informed, and empowered from day one.

Provide unified access across systems

AnAI Assistant serves as a single conversational interface for all systems, aggregating actions and knowledge from your existing tools. Employees interact with one assistant that connects to everything they need — eliminating the need to learn multiple portals or submit separate tickets.

Learn how the Moveworks AI Assistant connects employee support across all your systems.

Deliver personalized, context-aware guidance

Customize what each employee sees based on their role, location, department, and permissions. A software engineer in Austin gets different onboarding tasks than a sales rep in London, but both get what they need, when they need it. This personalization speeds up ramp time and creates a better overall experience.

Orchestrate multi-step workflows end-to-end

Agentic AI assistants can handle complex workflows, like access approvals, ID verification, and benefits enrollment, by coordinating actions across multiple systems. This reduces the employee's manual work and the internal team's workload, creating a smoother experience from start to finish.

Consider a single automation layer that supports employees throughout their entire journey, from onboarding employees through role changes, everyday requests, and offboarding, without reintroducing manual work. 

If you automate onboarding with a point solution, manual steps can slowly but surely creep back in during promotions, manager changes, and other everyday HR and IT requests.

Moveworks can solve this by working across HR, IT, identity, and collaboration tools from day one through an employee’s last day. You build the automation once, and it keeps working as employees move through different stages, giving you fewer tickets, fewer handoffs, and a better experience.

By thinking beyond onboarding and choosing a lifecycle-based automation platform, you can reduce manual work at scale, improve productivity, and deliver a better company culture and employee experience… long after day one.

See how Moveworks can streamline onboarding from day zero to full productivity.

Creating an employee-focused onboarding experience with Moveworks

The Moveworks platform is ideal for automating onboarding and delivering instant, self-service support through the AI Assistant. New hires can get immediate access to the information, tools, and actions they need without waiting on HR or IT or jumping between systems.

The platform can connect to your HRIS, ITSM, identity systems, and collaboration tools to automate access provisioning, HR updates, and common first-week requests from start to finish. It shows you what new hires ask about most, so you can proactively provide a fix before they impact the next group of employees.

Built to scale with your organization, Moveworks supports global teams in over 100 languages. And it works long after onboarding ends, handling role changes, access updates, and everyday employee requests without creating more manual work.

With Moveworks, you can:

• Orchestrate across systems: Moveworks provides a single conversational interface for actions and knowledge across HR, IT, identity, and collaboration tools — from Workday and SuccessFactors to ServiceNow, Okta, Azure AD, Slack, and Teams.
• Agentic reasoning: The platform uses advanced AI to adapt workflows based on role, location, and system context, handling complex tasks like access approvals and benefits enrollment without reintroducing manual work.
• Fast time-to-value: Organizations are able to deliver impact quickly without rebuilding onboarding from scratch, thanks to hundreds of prebuilt connectors and out-of-the-box integrations.