How Australian Retirement Trust’s People team answers employee questions safely at scale with AI

Challenge

As a global top 20 pension fund managing $330 billion for more than 2.4 million members, Australian Retirement Trust (ART) knows what it means to operate at scale.

It shows up internally with the People team fielding 100s of recurring employee questions every day.

“We’d have around 500 different inquiries a day and 400 of those would be the same thing,” says Adam Fitzhenry, General Manager (People Services & Enablement).

The People team knew what they wanted to tackle head-on:

• Repeat questions coming in from all sides of the business
• Employees seeking clarification on policies that were already documented
• Low-level queries taking time away from higher-value People initiatives

“We had the content already available. We’d just direct people to that content or write back to them and tell them the answer.”

The goal was simple: “Everyone wants things to be easy.”

Solution

ART partnered with Josef to create AI Q&A tools that they could trust to give employees reliable, actionable answers on demand.

“We were looking for a tool that enabled us to apply levels of governance that you don’t get from something like ChatGPT or Copilot,” Adam says.

• The tools would draw from approved policies only
• Embedding tools on SharePoint would accelerate adoption
• Real-time reporting and human-in-the-loop training meant People could oversee and control the AI outputs

“The ability to know that there’s a level of governance around the answers, and that we could report on that with transparency, was really important to us,” Adam says.

“The tools really needed to be integrated into our daily workflows on our intranet”, he adds. “That’s where the majority of people get their daily news and the latest resources.”

Example: Answering questions on personal leave

Previously, employees would email or message the People team directly to confirm policy wording or clarify processes.

Now, employees can get answers to questions any time they want. Answers are accurate, backed by verifiable sources and drawn from approved documentation only.

The impact was felt almost immediately post-launch.

“We’ve got 15 minutes being saved per question. And that’s just through a number of tools that people are self-reporting,” Adam said. 

Results

With the tools now in place, the People team can continue helping all corners of the business at scale.

• Employees are saving 15 minutes with every question they ask
• Fewer repetitive questions distract the team from higher-value work
• There’s fast, on-demand access to information for everyone at ART

As Adam puts it: “I just want to get all the low-level stuff out of the way.”

“We hadn’t anticipated such significant savings, but the fact that people are sharing that with us is fantastic.”