How to Build a 100-person company without HR

, inspired us to share more on our philosophy of 

to streamline our administrative overhead and create a culture of autonomy. We’re committed to practicing what we preach at Ema, and so we create and deploy AI Employees that can automate mundane tasks, boost productivity, and free our teams up for high-value, creative work.

This is the story behind two of Ema’s internal AI Employees—

—what they do, how they were built, the results they’ve achieved, and what we’ve learned along the way.

While this blog may spark some ideas for existing Ema customers, it can also provide inspiration for other leaders wanting to know how to implement Agentic AI for tangible results in their organization.

How did we discover Agentic AI use-cases within Ema?

In order to identify the most high-impact use-cases, we analysed our team’s workflows and processes and interviewed key management stakeholders. We found a few patterns across functions that senior leaders reading this would probably resonate with:

Several key operational and technical learnings and best-practices hidden away in people’s minds

Significant overlap in information discussed across the company, leading to key team-members repeating the same explanations over and over, serving as bottle-neck in efficient operations

Significant time spent in mundane web-searches, information finding and summarisation tasks

Overburdened teams: Certain functions, like security and compliance, are especially faced with heavy and unpredictable customer demand

Loss of time spent in awaiting async responses from other teams

 were some of the key functions that dealt with the above patterns. We decided to tackle them first: Employee Experience is important because of its widespread impact on the productivity and well-being of everyone at Ema. Sales, of course, is as a strategic revenue function, which could be most affected by the above dysfunctional organizational patterns. Information silos and bottle-necks, especially in an industry as fast-paced as ours, can actively compromise a company’s ability to move fast, drive sales, and succeed.

Work Better, Faster: How Ema’s AI Employees help

Three months down the line, we at Ema have completely transformed our Employee Experience and Sales processes using Agentic AI. Both these AI Employees are available 24x7 on Slack, and perform a whole host of functions that streamline our team’s workflows.

Provides personalised (geo-specific and role-specific) answers to all questions linked to Ema’s many policies, from insurance and benefits to ESOPs, vacation and sick leave policies

Educates and onboards on Ema’s product offering and the AI landscape

Performs HR actions, including leave application, fetching payslips, updating tax information, and more

Streamlines onboarding for new joiners by creating a personalized onboarding guide for every new employee, also serving as a digital buddy to answer any questions about Ema’s culture, organisational principles, internal tools, etc.

In summary, we no longer have a traditional HR team for our team of 100+ employees, spread out across India and the US. Our Agentic AI-first approach has enabled us to be among the first few companies globally to achieve this. HR in Ema is therefore a more strategic function than usual, involved in building culture and hiring the best talent.

Creates sales briefs with company background and buyer background alongside tailored pitch points for every customer meeting

Autonomously answers all vendor questionnaires (including those on security & compliance) and writes responses to RFPs

Provides intelligence across all customer call transcripts to identify sentiment of every customer, key selling propositions, key product questions & concerns etc.

Provides intelligence on all of Ema’s Hubspot, allowing deep pipeline analysis using simple, natural language questions

Connects with calendar and email to auto follow-up with prospects at regular intervals with personalised emails

Creates pitch-decks ahead of every customer meeting tailored to the customer’s industry and scale utilising compendium of Ema’s existing decks

Provides instant access to all sales SOPs, product documentation, customer onboarding guides etc.

Ema’s Sales Assistant has transformed my entire sales process - I save about an hour before critical client calls typically spent on research and creating a starter deck. For each deal that progress to later stages, our pre-sales and sales team collectively saves around 4 hours on filling vendor questionnaires for clients. I have so much more time to focus on actual sales now.

Using Ema’s Generative Workflow Engine™ to easily build AI Employees

 to tackle our use-cases with Langchain. But after deploying some engineering bandwidth for a trial, we realised we were progressing at a painfully slow pace. We had to manually:

Build, optimize, tune, and maintain AI Agents for every use-case

Maintain data connectors with the SaaS platforms we were integrating with

Create and configure AI Agents with tools needed to perform actions for each SaaS platform (e.g. RazorpayX for applying for leave, Slack for communication, etc.)

This is when we understood the need for a platform that would speed up our pace of development. And soon, Ema’s 

™ was born, to solve the challenges we encountered in our quest to create simple, effective, enterprise-grade 

With Ema’s GWE, we brought over a dozen use-cases to life in just a couple of weeks—without writing a single line of code

As the builder of Ema’s internal AI Employees, our Employee Assistant and our Sales Assistant, here’s what I loved about using Generative Workflow Engine™:

No agonizing over communication and data-flow between agents

Not having to struggle with reading documentation of various SaaS API providers to figure out authentication, data syncing or taking actions

Not worrying about the impact of the latest LLM launches on our use-cases. 

EmaFusion™ intelligently combines the output of over 100+ LLMs, optimizing for accuracy, costs, and latency

—while keeping AI investments future-proof

The ability to focus purely on the business logic and end-user experience whilst abstracting away all of the technical tedium is a magical experience. 

As a business-user, being able to build out these Agentic AI use-cases I’d conceived, without any technical dependencies, was liberating and enabled delivering of impact in record time.

Learnings from our journey, and how to start with Agentic AI

 to streamline our internal productivity is a strategic priority, as we 

 to customers with similar goals—and at a much larger scale.

If Ema’s AI Employees can save a few hours each week for 100-people—while unlocking new efficiencies and making space for high-value, creative work—imagine what is possible for tens or hundreds of thousands of employees, with 

Some of Ema’s customers have been leading the way. 

Here are common lessons from our journeys, for other leaders looking to achieve transformation in their organizations:

Approach the problem customer-first, not tech-first:

 Involve the user in the solution process from Day 1; Leverage their insights and think impact-first when planning your solution instead of obsessing over the best LLM to use; Let solutions like 

™ handle the LLM-level optimisation for you

Take a conscious decision on building from scratch vs utilising an agentic business automation platform: 

Think through the benefits and drawbacks of each approach in your context before finalising an approach to automate your workflows; Ensure that you account for developer hours, ongoing maintenance and development delays when thinking through the RoI on building from scratch

Build incrementally starting with solving a single problem and build momentum with quick wins: 

Instead of launching the perfect AI Employee to automate all woes of a function, start by tackling a small yet thorny user problem and launch incremental features; Ramping up usage within the organisation takes time and multiple quick wins will help accelerate it

. Our entire journey so far has proven that in the new AI-first future, all data intelligence and manipulation can be done from the comfort of a native chat interface, without needing to navigate and click through mazes of SaaS platforms while paying for more seats than you need. Instead, opt for end-to-end agentic automation, delivered at a fraction of the cost.

We hope that our journey has given you the motivation to start experimenting within your enterprise today. If you wish to join the list of enterprises 10x-ing their productivity with Agentic AI, 

book a demo of Ema’s AI Employees today

No More Boring Work: How Ema’s Agentic AI Platform Supercharges our HR and Sales

—a breakthrough assistant powered by Agentic AI that puts enterprise knowledge, automation, and seamless execution at employees' fingertips. Unlike traditional chatbots that rely on keyword searches, Ema integrates with 200+ enterprise apps and systems, building a deep organizational graph and applying agentic reasoning to automate complex enterprise workflows.

Some of the world’s largest enterprises already use Ema as their employee assistant. By automating everyday tasks, Ema helps organizations save millions in support costs, increases employee satisfaction to over 80%, and leads the way for enterprise-wide Agentic AI adoption.

Ema has completely changed our expectations. Our previous vendor couldn’t even support multiple countries, but Ema not only understands complex policies—she reasons through them, takes actions and resolves complex employee issues end-to-end. 

– Chief Information Officer, Global Conglomerate (with 250,000+ employees)

The Problem: What’s Slowing Employees Down?

The workplace today is filled with inefficiencies. Employees spend more time fighting friction than doing their best work. Here’s what’s getting in their way:

 Key knowledge is buried in emails, wikis, and chat threads, forcing employees to waste time digging for answers.

 Simple tasks—like requesting IT support or approving expenses—require navigating cumbersome forms and workflows that slow everything down.

Chatbots and Gen AI co-pilots fall short:

 Most workplace AI tools rely on rigid keyword searches and predefined workflows, failing to adapt to real-world complexity.

Disconnected assistants causing overload:

 Every enterprise platform now comes with its own AI assistant, yet none of them seamlessly connect with all enterprise systems. Instead of reducing complexity, they have added to it.

How Ema Transforms the Employee Experience

Ema’s AI Employee Assistant helps organizations drive productivity and improve employee experience while significantly reducing costs. Here’s how:

 Ema builds a secure, private organizational knowledge graph, ingesting every document she has access to while seamlessly adapting to your company’s unique terminology, permission flows and org structure.

Unlike traditional search, Ema understands context, relationships, and policy nuances—not just keywords. She delivers accurate, context-aware answers, always backed by citations, so employees can trust the information they receive.

 Ema doesn’t just assist—she takes action. From filing expenses to troubleshooting IT issues, she executes workflows dynamically by integrating with enterprise apps, eliminating the need for rigid, hard-coded processes.

Beyond answering employee requests, Ema works alongside other AI employees to automate routine tasks that are done manually today. From onboarding new hires to competitor research and meeting summaries, Ema automates it all—becoming a productivity accelerator for your enterprise.

Transparent, Insightful, and Always Improving: 

Admins have full visibility into interactions and actions taken through auditable logs, while Ema continuously learns from feedback provided by both admins and end users—constantly refining and improving over time.

 Ema is built to be the one assistant employees rely on. She integrates seamlessly with other assistants and applications and is available across channels like MS Teams, Google Chat, Slack, Intranet and voice in 100+ languages. 

Here’s more on each capability and how it works.

With Ema, simply connect your knowledge base (e.g., SharePoint, Google Drive, Box etc.) and employee directory (e.g., Active Directory, Okta), and she will automatically ingest and structure this information, privately and securely. By mapping relationships between people, content, metadata, permissions, and workflows, Ema gains a deep understanding of your organization.

This allows her to interpret employee queries with nuance while ensuring that every employee only accesses what they should—and nothing more. Everything stays auto-synced, so there’s no need to manually update multiple systems—just make changes in your primary knowledge base, and Ema will update her knowledge graph in real time.

Enterprise policies are complex, ever-evolving, and managed by multiple teams over the years. They vary based on several factors, such as an employee’s location, department, and job band, making simple keyword search ineffective.

Ema takes a different approach. Using advanced reasoning, she understands the intent behind employee queries, pulls in relevant employee details, and generates personalized, context-aware answers. Unlike traditional search, Ema can read and interpret complex tables, presentations, and reports, intelligently formatting responses with tables, links, and structured data as needed.

Every response comes with citations, ensuring employees can verify sources—building trust in Ema’s accuracy. By seamlessly handling conversations with human-like intelligence, Ema acts as a true employee assistant, not just a chatbot. Whether it's an HR policy, a product document, or a step-by-step troubleshooting guide, Ema surfaces the right information—instantly.

Enterprise workflows often rely on fragmented legacy systems, making automation complex. Traditionally, admins had to manually hard-code every possible workflow path, leading to rigid, non-scalable chatbots with limited coverage and effectiveness.

Ema takes a different approach. Built on an agentic platform, she connects to the employee helpdesk, observes how top agents resolve issues, and learns from their actions. Instead of following pre-set paths, Ema dynamically plans and executes the best steps to resolve employee queries, leveraging 200+ enterprise integrations—including custom apps, RPA, and data lakes.

Now, admins don’t need to hard-code workflows. They can simply define high-level goals and guardrails, and Ema will intelligently handle the rest—making enterprise automation truly flexible and scalable.

Handling HR and IT requests is just the beginning. A true AI-powered employee assistant should act as a sidekick, helping employees be more productive in their daily work. Ema does exactly that.

She connects with other AI employees built on Ema’s 

, enabling employees to trigger workflows directly from Slack or Microsoft Teams. From filling RFPs to researching prospects or sending emails, teams can conversationally build workflows, publish them to Ema’s employee assistant, and make them available company-wide.

Once published, employees can trigger these workflows within the assistant, eliminating manual, repetitive tasks and saving hours every day.

Transparent, Insightful, and Always Improving

Ema is built for transparency. Admins can review every interaction, the actions she takes, and the reasoning behind them. She continuously learns from natural language feedback provided by both end users and admins.

Her metrics dashboard gives leaders deep insights into employee issues, missing knowledge base content, and top employee queries—helping organizations make more informed decisions.

As adoption grows, Ema naturally becomes the go-to channel for leadership to share communications, updates, and policies, turning her into a central hub for company-wide engagement.

Ema meets employees where they are—Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google chat, Email, intranet, or any enterprise application—so there’s no need to switch between tools. She can understand 100+ languages, meaning she can talk to employees in a language they’re comfortable with.

Ema is built to meet industry-leading compliance standards, including GDPR, SOC 2 (Type I & II), ISO 27001:2022, HIPAA, and NIST. Our data governance framework ensures PII is redacted before being passed to public LLMs, maintaining strict privacy controls.

Ema integrates seamlessly with your permission workflows and governance frameworks, ensuring employees only access the information they are authorized to see. With top-tier encryption and customizable private models, our comprehensive security approach reflects our commitment to handling sensitive data with the highest level of care.

From ‘Hire to Retire’— Ema Has You Covered

Unlike other vertical solutions, Ema is a horizontal Agentic AI platform whose suite of AI employees automate every aspect of Employee Experience — from onboarding and HR support to document generation and offboarding.

Ema seamlessly integrates with the tools you already use, ensuring a smooth and unified workflow. Further, with Ema’s Generative Workflow Engine™, you can create custom AI employees that can tackle the most complex workflows in any business function. Ema’s one-stop solution for Agentic Business Automation provides a holistic tech stack that amplifies the work of all your teams, so they can be more efficient and creative in their work.

Hire Ema today to transform your employee experience

Ema’s Employee Assistant redefines workplace productivity by removing friction, automating workflows, and making enterprise knowledge instantly accessible. With Ema, enterprises are saving millions of dollars in employee support costs while improving employee satisfaction and quality of support.

The best teams don’t just work harder—they work smarter. Ema is how modern enterprises unlock their full potential.

Introducing Ema’s Employee Assistant: The Trusted AI Companion for Your Employees

 transform enterprise workflows, enhancing efficiency and seamlessly integrating intelligence and automation.

— contracts, invoices, policies, purchase orders, insurance claims, compliance reports, financial statements, and regulatory filings. Enterprises usually find themselves sitting on a trove of undiscovered insights, buried underneath various unstructured and semi-structured content too, including as internal and external web pages, conversations on the internet, reviews from users, meeting transcripts, and more.

Teams across finance, legal, procurement, compliance, and HR all function using these various data sets. But they frequently find themselves bogged down in their analyses, given how document analysis is still slow, error-prone and expensive.

 manually searching, analyzing, and validating information across scattered PDFs, spreadsheets, and emails.

in critical domains such as compliance, financial reporting, and procurement slow down approvals and lead to costly inefficiencies.

Limited Gen AI co-pilots and vertical tools

, which largely only search and summarize documents, failing to handle the complex, multi-step workflows that businesses rely on.

Traditional automation solutions like RPA can extract data from files, but cannot reason, apply rules, or make intelligent decisions based on data autonomously. Gen AI solutions are limited to retrieval—they can’t automate business operations end-to-end.

Businesses need more than just AI-powered search to unlock true ROI — they need AI-powered execution.

Meet Ema’s Document Analytics Suite: Automating complex document workflows with Agentic AI

 Ema’s Document Analytics suite of AI Employees

. Ema isn’t just another chatbot or document search tool. She’s a comprehensive AI Employee, powered by multiple collaborating agents that not only extract and analyze data, but also validate and execute your complex workflows with the precision of a human expert.

Unmatched Accuracy and Human-Like Reasoning with Agentic Workflows

Proprietary multi-agent intelligence ensures near-perfect data extraction and context-driven decisions. Ema doesn’t stop at keyword matching; it 

Ema comes with a comprehensive set of pre-trained agents for common document workflow tasks, including extraction, reasoning, rule validation, quantitative calculation etc. These agents can collaborate with each other to automate multi-step workflows.

Having a kit of high-performing agents from Day 1 helps you get the fastest time to value with Ema - just tell Ema what you want and 

 will orchestrate the right agents to meet your needs.

Example GWE workflows for an auditing assistant that utilize multiple pre-trained analytics agents

The Agentic Dashboard: AI-Human Collaboration at its Best

Ema’s specialized interface goes beyond chat-based Q&A. 

 elevates the humble dashboard, traditionally used for complex analyses, with Agentic AI features and interactivity. It not only fills out the dashboard but also becomes a comprehensive collaboration tool, capable of working with human colleagues and getting better over time.

Ema explains the steps taken and the reasoning behind every cell and also provides deep sources, so that you can easily verify her work.

: Ema can collaborate with human teammates mid-workflow, letting you validate important decisions or unblock Ema in critical paths that require humans. Ema can also fix errors immediately if you share any feedback with her.

 Ema’s dashboards allow you to create complex multi-table visualizations, export data as you need it, and use formulae directly in Ema’s interface.

 Ema learns from your feedback to constantly improve her performance and become an integral part of your team.

 who handles the heavy lifting but still lets you steer the ship whenever needed. While the dashboard can be used to track usage and collaborate every day, your Ema’s Document Analytics AI Employees can also be accessed via APIs, chat, Ema’s document editor, or any other interface you might prefer.

Because Ema plugs into your ERP, CRM, or HRIS, it seamlessly moves from insight to action—whether that’s sending approvals, updating records, or triggering alerts. Ema offers one-click integration with 200+ apps, including Salesforce, Servicenow, Jira etc. Ema’s GWE further makes it a breeze to integrate with custom apps and APIs.

With Ema, you get robust encryption, advanced access controls, and 

compliance with leading security protocols

, such as GDPR, SOC 2 Type I & II, HIPAA, NIST CSF, and ISO 27001 and 

, keeping your sensitive enterprise data safe and secure. Further, Ema automatically redacts information before passing it on to external AI models and public LLMs.

Four real case studies from our early customers

📜 Contract & Policy Compliance: Automating Regulatory Checks

thousands of contracts and regulatory filings

 (GDPR, SOX, HIPAA), making compliance reviews 

Extracts, structures, and validates contract terms

🏥 Healthcare & Insurance: Automating Prior Authorization & Claims Processing

automate rule validation for prior authorizations

manually process prior authorizations and claims

, leading to delays in patient care and unnecessary denials.

 from insurance documents and applies them to patient records.

💰 Finance & Audit: Automating Invoice, Procurement, & Transaction Validation

validate supplier invoices against contracts

match invoices, purchase orders, and financial transactions

Cross-checks invoices, purchase orders, and contracts

duplicate payments, discrepancies, and missing approvals

🛠 Procurement & Bid Evaluation: Automating RFP Reviews

 in different formats, making bid evaluation 

compliance, cost-effectiveness, and technical fit

Hire Ema to 10x your document workflows today

Take the next step toward streamlined operations and data-driven insights. Contact us to learn how Ema’s Document Analytics Suite can be tailored to your enterprise needs and begin delivering measurable ROI in a matter of weeks.

We’re excited to see you turn your document management chaos into a real competitive advantage with Ema’s Document Analytics AI Employee.

Introducing Ema's Document Analytics AI Employee: Go From Data to Decisions in Seconds

At Ema, we scaled to 100 people without a traditional HR team—not by ignoring HR, but by automating routine work with AI Employees. By letting Agentic AI handle repetitive queries and workflows, human talent can focus on what truly matters: strategy, creativity, and leadership.

understand, reason, plan, and act autonomously

, is fundamentally transforming enterprise operations.

 so that humans can focus on strategic, creative, and high-value initiatives. That mission led us to a bold experiment: 

scaling a company to 100 employees without a dedicated Human Resources (HR) department

—or traditional roles that primarily exist to answer repetitive questions and process requests across 

Rethinking HR: Why Have People Doing Work That AI Can Do?

HR teams, like many other enterprise functions, often spend a 

 handling administrative tasks rather than focusing on meaningful work. Consider the reality in most organizations:

vacation policies, travel guidelines, and expense reimbursements

, preventing them from engaging in more impactful work, like designing better 

 to answer basic questions from their teams.

At Ema, instead of hiring HR personnel to respond to these routine queries, we let 

—whether they’re in Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Google Chat—and instantly get 

Ema does more than just answer questions. She

—filing vacation requests, opening tickets in service management systems, updating tasks in project management tools, and more.

 who can spend more time on enriching employee experience.

 to focus on leadership rather than being internal policy encyclopedias.

Scaling Beyond HR: The Future of Enterprise Automation

HR isn’t the only area where we’re testing this AI-first approach. Other departments across enterprises are full of similar inefficiencies.

For example, our sales team doesn’t need to wait for a 

 to answer questions about compliance for enterprise customers. Instead, 

: "What are our security policies?" "Can you help me fill out this security questionnaire?"

Ema, having learned from our internal documentation and compliance frameworks, generates accurate, pre-approved responses, ensuring consistency while eliminating wait times, ensuring sales teams can focus on building relationships and closing deals.

 AI SDR (Sales Development Representative) for our own lead generation

. Sales teams provide inputs on who to target, and Ema’s SDR AI Employee builds and runs the campaigns with highly personalized reach outs, leading to 5x more bookings without adding headcount

Now, imagine these productivity gains across 

finance, legal, procurement, IT, and more

. Enterprises can scale faster, reduce overhead, and allow 

human employees to focus on high-impact work

The Business Case for AI Employees: Always On, Always Scalable

Forget things or provide inconsistent responses.

Quit, requiring costly recruitment and training.

Be available 24/7, in any language, across any timezone.

—without the costs associated with expanding a human workforce.

—no matter where employees are located.

, helping teams find answers without navigating fragmented internal systems.

This is not about replacing humans but rather augmenting them, 

All posts that contain tag Agentic AI

No More Boring Work: How Ema’s Agentic AI Platform Supercharges our HR and Sales

Introducing Ema’s Employee Assistant: The Trusted AI Companion for Your Employees

Introducing Ema's Document Analytics AI Employee: Go From Data to Decisions in Seconds

How to Build a 100-person Company Without HR—With Agentic AI

Introducing Generative Workflow Engine™: Ema’s Revolutionary AI Employee Builder

Introducing EmaFusion™: Your one-stop solution for getting the most out of LLMs