Borderless AI Launches AI Agent for Human Resources with Cohere

Overview

Borderless AI, the first AI-powered Employer of Record platform, has collaborated with Cohere to provide tailored AI agents for the Human Resource (HR) category. Alberni, the world’s first AI agent for HR, provides real-time, accurate compliance information across 170+ countries. Conversations with Alberni boosts efficiency and productivity for HR managers seeking to expand their global teams.

The Challenge

Managing and paying a global workforce is a major challenge facing the HR teams of multinational organizations. Borderless AI is the first provider to bring the power of AI to the HR category, using advanced AI to automate HR processes. The company’s solutions significantly reduce the administrative burden and help to ensure compliance with local laws, making it easier for HR teams to navigate the complexities of global employment.

Typically, HR managers build their global employment expertise by retrieving information from multiple databases, which requires an enormous amount of time and resources. Also, because employment laws and regulations change regularly, HR managers worry about retrieving the most accurate and up-to-date information when they’re hiring and managing global employees. Borderless AI aims to simplify the HR stack and help HR teams with tasks like creating contracts, streamlining onboarding, and understanding HR laws in different regions.

According to Wilson Cross, CEO and Co-Founder of Borderless AI: “Navigating global employment complexities is a major challenge for HR professionals. Alberni, our AI agent for HR, addresses this by providing real-time, accurate compliance information. This collaboration with Cohere enhances productivity and efficiency, setting new standards in the HR industry.”

While building Alberni, Borderless AI aimed to deliver accurate answers 99.9% of the time. “We're not perfect, but perfect is our goal,” says Edward Robinson, Lead Software engineer for Alberni. “For example, when a user asks questions like, "What is the minimum wage?", it’s crucial that Alberni returns the correct answer.”

"We're servicing 170+ countries; how do we get the right documents to Alberni at the right time so it could effectively answer specific user questions. Even using the largest AI models with the most extensive context window, it’s not feasible to serve Alberni the full range of HR documents for such a large number of countries. That's where retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) became the team’s best choice to meet Alberni’s demand and scale.

With RAG and Cohere Tool Use, the Borderless AI team could surface the documents that are most relevant to a user’s conversation with Alberni, and then pass those documents to the generative AI model and have it generate an answer.

The Solution

Over the course of several months, the Borderless AI and Cohere teams worked closely to build out the Alberni solution with advanced retrieval-augmented generation and tool use.

Edward Robinson, Lead Software engineer for Alberni, explains: “Alberni is an AI agent built to simplify all the things involved in hiring and paying international team members. All aspects across the HR stack get run through our AI agents to automate mundane tasks and create cost efficiencies for HR professionals. We have initially focused on employment contract creation and vacation requests, and we’re gearing up to launch international AI-powered expense reimbursements.”

The Borderless AI team initially struggled with hallucinations in long conversations and inaccurate answers due to outdated data. To address these challenges, they implemented Cohere’s advanced retrieval-augmented generation system, with Cohere Command R+, Cohere Embed, and Cohere Rerank. They were then able to surface relevant documents and provide accurate answers. They also split long conversations into separate interactions to improve context understanding and reduce hallucinations. Additionally, they used web sockets for streaming responses, improving performance and making the AI feel more natural and responsive.

The team also introduced function calling (also known as tool use), to enable Alberni to answer questions from multiple databases, such as local employment law and company policies like vacation requests and payroll information. This enables Alberni to answer complex questions, for example: “How many sick days did Bob use this year?” The team plans to focus on contract generation and expense management as the next steps for Alberni's development.

Further, by using Cohere Embed, Alberni can support over 100 languages, including cross-language queries.

To test the solution, Borderless AI worked with five of the world’s largest employment law firms. They provided attorneys with side-by-side comparisons of the output from Alberni’s custom models versus the output from Command R+ for the same question. They were surprised by how strong the reaction was from their testers.

According to Wilson Cross, CEO and Co-Founder of Borderless AI, “Ninety-one percent of the time, the employment lawyers preferred the output from Alberni. Usually, it was because it was a longer, more up-to-date answer with relevant sourcing. It went into the nuances of the question’s intent and covered more relevant edge cases.”

Impact

The impact of the solution is primarily measured through accuracy and speed. Borderless AI emphasized the importance of accuracy in their domain, striving for 99.9% accuracy in jurisdictions they service.

To evaluate the system, Borderless AI used a massive spreadsheet of questions, running them through the application and then manually checking the answers. They also compared the results with off-the-shelf LLM outputs to measure improvements.

The Cohere-powered solution provided significant improvements in accuracy and speed, enabling Alberni to quickly answer complex questions about employment law, onboarding employees, and company information in a natural flow of conversation. The streaming responses improved the user experience, making the AI feel more natural and responsive.

The results are clear when we look at customer adoption rates. In the last 60 days, 50% of business users who sign up have been using AI solutions to enable them to onboard to Borderless AI faster.

With Cohere, Borderless AI is able to continue building safe solutions that mitigate against hallucinations. The company is now gearing up to launch new capabilities, such as AI-powered expense reimbursements.