by Mason Bright
The new hire sits down and stares at a stack of forms. Benefits. Direct deposit. Code of conduct. Policies that matter yet drown people in paperwork. HR teams do what they can. They lose hours anyway. Dealers know this rhythm because they live it with their own reps and techs. So we asked a plain question. What if a robot handled the rote and gave humans back the hard parts.
The pilot is simple. We trained an LLM on a dealer’s HR manual. We loaded it onto a robot we already use for office demos. The bot can move like any AMR. It can also talk. It knows the handbook down to the last line break. A new employee sits with it. The robot answers questions, collects information, and walks the person through an orientation flow. When done, it writes back to the system and logs what it did.
In the webcast, we did not pitch it as a cure-all. It is a force multiplier. It turns three hours into minutes for routine cases. It runs after lunch when HR is pulled into something urgent. It can point a human to anything sensitive or nuanced. It does not fall sick. It does not forget a step. It becomes another member of the office that never needs a calendar hold.
This is more than a cute demo. It shows how dealers can pair movement with knowledge to build value. In the morning the robot makes supply runs. At noon it runs onboarding. Late afternoon it delivers ID badges from reception to a manager. One platform, many roles. Dealers understand this pattern because multi-function sold the last generation of hardware. This is multi-function with feet.
The sales motion aims at time and error. HR work splits into high judgment and high repetition. The high repetition part is ripe for automation. Show the customer a map of steps. Show error rates at signature capture. Show delays when managers cannot find the right form. Then show a robot that never loses the thread. The output is compliance done faster and people who feel guided instead of handed a packet.
Concerns surface fast. Privacy. Retention. Policy drift. We answer with structure. For regulated sites, the LLM runs on private infrastructure. Access is role-based. Logs are kept. The model only sees the HR corpus it needs, not the entire network. Updates follow the same policy path the company already uses. The robot is the front end. The rules live in the back. Dealers who can talk NIST and policy with confidence will win here. This is where channel IT teams earn larger contracts.
The experience matters too. Robots in the office should feel like good coworkers. They need to stay out of the way in halls. They need to wait while a person finishes typing. They need to know when to hand off a question to a human. These are design choices, not miracles. Dealers already teach customers how to use hardware and avoid jams. Now they will teach customers where a robot parks and how to start a session. The playbooks look familiar, just aimed at movement and speech.
Dion pushed the vision wider. HR today lives across phones, watches, and sometimes rings. Tomorrow it lives in a chip under the skin. You do not need to buy that timeline to see the path. Orientation that can happen anywhere, with a device that knows the policy and respects the perimeter, is useful. The robot becomes a mobile kiosk you can send to the person who needs help. It steps into a training room. It rolls to a desk. It escorts a tour and answers questions on the move.
What about cost. You sell the pilot first. Four weeks. Measure time saved per new hire. Count the questions the robot handled. Track error reduction and completion rates. Price the expanded rollout by managed instance and service tier. If the site wants a cost-per-onboard model, consider it where the task is well defined and logged. If not, sell a flat monthly with clear SLAs. The robot is a platform. The service is the product.
This is also a recruiting tool. Young techs want to work on systems that think and move. A small in-office HR bot shows candidates the company is not stuck. It gives your own team a place to learn. Firmware updates. Route tuning. Prompt design. Policy maps. The skills stack grows out of real work, not a lab.
The November event will make this real. We will run the HR bot alongside the supply run proof. People will see a robot drop toner and then sit with a human to answer benefits questions. The juxtaposition is the point. Movement and knowledge in one frame. Dealers can sell that in any city. Hospitals. Universities. Warehouses with office wings. Finance floors. Government buildings with long corridors and longer policies.
We started Crickets to translate. Copier to robot. Dealer motion to robot motion. HR onboarding is a clean translation. It touches every company. It costs time every week. It carries compliance risk if you miss steps. A robot that knows the handbook and can walk a person through it is not a gimmick. It is a tool that gives people back their morning.
The stack will keep changing. Standards will help. Policies will shift. We stay inside the facts and ship what works. The next time a new hire sits down, the stack of forms can be a conversation. The hallway hum changes and so does the day.
— Mason Bright
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