For HR teams
You have answered this question before. Four times this week.
Your team already writes the HR knowledge base, one reply at a time. It just goes to one person's inbox instead of somewhere the next person will look. SecondBrain 365 is an AI agent with its own email address inside your Microsoft 365: forward it that reply and it becomes a knowledge base page.
See how SecondBrain 365 supports HR teams in their day-to-day, starting from the questions people already ask you.
The portal is not the problem
Almost every company has one. What nobody has is the twenty minutes after answering an employee's question, when somebody would have to turn that reply into a page — so the reply goes to one inbox and the question comes back next month, from someone else.
94%
of organisations already have an employee portal. Two thirds have personalised it and integrated it with their systems.
ScottMadden + APQC HR Shared Services benchmark, 2023 — large enterprises, 80% North America
~15
enquiries a day handled by a median Tier 1 HR service centre agent — around 26 in the top quartile.
Same benchmark, median and top-quartile values
60%
of employees say obtaining vital information is difficult or nearly impossible.
Panopto/YouGov 2018 — n=1,001 US employees at 200+ staff companies
These are US-weighted benchmarks and we say so. The pattern holds in our own market; the numbers were measured in someone else's.
The whole workflow
Forward the reply. That is the whole process.
The careful answer your team wrote about parental leave was already the policy page. Forwarding it to the agent is what turns it into one — no template, no editor, no HR portal project.
The answer is already written
Somebody in your team explained it properly, in plain language, to one colleague. That is the version worth keeping — better than the policy PDF nobody opens.
Written the way people ask
A knowledge base built from real questions uses the words employees actually use — “when do I get paid if I am off sick”, not “sickness absence remuneration policy”.
And Copilot can answer from it
The pages are ordinary SharePoint, so the colleague who would have emailed you can get the answer without emailing you.
RE: parental leave — how much notice do I need to give?
From: HR · 9 Sep
Hi Giulia — you need to give us three months' notice in writing.
The form is on the portal under Leave, and it goes to your manager first.
Pay is full salary for the first month, then statutory.
If the dates move later you can change them once, up to 30 days before.
Pick a record to see where it came from.
One forwarded reply, three entries the next person finds — in the words your team actually used. Press one to see the line it came from.
If your company had Viva Topics, it organised answers that were already in SharePoint — and HR's best answers live in email. Looking for a Viva Topics alternative?
A concrete case
The policy that changed, and the page that didn't
Two years ago — The remote work policy is written: two days a week, agreed with your manager.
This spring — It becomes three days, announced in an all-hands and confirmed in an email. The intranet page is never touched.
Right after — The agent had read both. What it does next is on the right — and it asks, because which policy is in force is not a decision an agent should make.
Policy page · Mar 2024 · Intranet — Remote work
Employees may work remotely two days per week.
Elena Conti · 14 Apr · All-hands follow-up
From May, remote work goes to three days per week.
SecondBrain 365Agent
Two answers on remote working
The policy page says two days per week. April's announcement says three days per week. Which one is in force?
Days per week:two days per week
Until someone decides, the page keeps two days per week and the alert stays open.
Nobody was re-reading the intranet. Two people asking the same question this month would have got two different answers, depending on which one they found.
We are not going to quote you a figure on what inconsistent policies cost: no credible research measures it, and the numbers in circulation do not survive a check. The risk is one you already recognise — two employees, same question, different answer, same month.
What goes in, what comes out
The sources your team already works in. Nothing to adopt, and no HR portal project to run.
In
The questions sent to the HR mailbox, and your replies
The channel where people ask the quick ones
Policy documents you already have
Induction material, handbooks, agreements
Out
- Policy pages in the language people asked in
- A FAQ built from real questions, not guessed ones
- Onboarding checklists that match what actually happens
- Every answer dated, so you can see what is stale
- Alerts when two documents disagree
⚠️ Employment terms, disciplinary matters and anything personal stay out: you choose what is shared with the agent, and an HR knowledge base is about policy, not about people.
What it changes over a year
New joiners ask you less
Not because you told them not to, but because the answer exists where they look first.
The team's knowledge is not one person's
The colleague who knows how the pension scheme actually works will not always be in the room.
One version, dated
When an auditor or a works council asks what the policy was in March, there is an answer with a date on it.
FAQ
Questions HR teams ask
The agent only sees what someone deliberately shares with it — a forwarded email, a document, a channel it was added to. Nothing is read automatically and no mailbox is connected. The practical rule is the one you would apply to a colleague: forward the reply about the parental leave policy, not the conversation about a specific person's situation. And everything stays in your own Microsoft 365 tenant, under your existing permissions and retention rules.
Almost everyone has the portal — in the benchmark we cite, 94% do. What the portal does not have is a way to get today's answer into it. This removes the writing step: the reply your team already sent becomes a page, by forwarding it. The portal stays where it is; it just stops being out of date.
You do. Turn on approval and nothing enters the knowledge base until someone signs it off — which is the sensible setting for HR, where a page people rely on carries weight. And when the agent finds two documents disagreeing, it asks rather than picking: which policy is in force is not a decision for an agent.
It is not written by AI in the sense that matters: it is your team's own reply, kept. The wording came from a person in your HR team, the page says when it was written, and someone approved it if you asked for approval. That is a stronger provenance than most intranet pages can show today.
Yes, and it is the common pattern — one workspace per department, each with its own rules and its own members. Legal, procurement, quality: the mechanism is identical, and the knowledge bases stay separate because the workspaces do.
Need it for something else?
Same agent, same mechanism. What changes is the rules you write in the context file.
Project management
Stop chasing people for updates: the agent asks, and the plan stays current
Product management
Why the product is the way it is — written down while you decide it
IT service desk
Forward the reply you just sent. That is the whole documentation step
ISO audit
Evidence recorded as it happens, not reconstructed the month before
RFP & bids
The tender's deadlines pulled out of the pack, and the chasing done for you
Onboarding & offboarding
What leaves with a person becomes smaller — and it is honest about the rest