Why this agent
The dirty secret of onboarding isn't that new hires have questions — it's that they stop asking them. Around week two, the social cost kicks in: "I should know this by now." So they guess, or they silently lose an hour reverse-engineering the expense process, or they ship the thing without knowing who was supposed to review it. Buddies and managers are great for question one; they are unintentionally terrible for question forty, because the new hire is keeping count even when the buddy isn't.
An agent has no opinion of you. That's the entire value proposition. It will answer "how do I book a meeting room" for the ninth time with the same patience as the first, at 11pm, in the new hire's third week, with a citation to the actual handbook page. The People capability is the sleeper feature: half of early-tenure confusion is organizational, not procedural — "who owns the release calendar," "who do I ask about access to the analytics workspace" — and that's exactly the question new hires are most embarrassed to ask a human.
The hard rules matter more here than anywhere. A new hire trusts everything the company puts in front of them, so an onboarding agent that improvises about payroll dates, visa implications, or benefits eligibility isn't just wrong — it's wrong to the one audience with no instinct to double-check. Those topics route to HR, every time, by name.