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ROB – twinly named after Bosch’s founder Robert Bosch, and the word ‘robot’– is a self-service HR tool that’s box-fresh this year for the company’s 429,000 associates. It doesn’t promise everything, but it does deliver the basics ‘brilliantly’ – the deeper issues aren’t addressed via this AI tool and nor should they be.
Think of Bosch and slide into a world of white goods, it’s a brand that comes with a tag of reassurance that their products will work. When the global employer introduced their own HR digital solution, it came with that similar promise, that it would also deliver. HR Grapevine spoke to Niklas Fehrling, Vice President of HR Digitalisation and Global HR IT, and Deepak Sharma, Senior HR IT Project Manager, at the multinational business to find out what it’s like to introduce a people management game-changer for a company where it’s not the ‘done thing’ to gamble on a wild card.
Precision is key for a business like Bosch. It doesn’t do anything less than perfect. It’s the same for its people management services. The starting point was the existing HR digitalisation programmes that had been around for a few years within the business. A key focus was upon improving the user experience and reducing the effort on the HR side. “We sat down knowing those were the two focus areas and that we had the technology for the interface on how to find processes within an existing portal, but it wasn’t the best in the world and the feedback told us so,” knowing this says Ferhling, meant that wasn’t going to be good enough for a business that has a presence in 60 countries. They decided, as Ferhling adds, ‘to catch two flies with one hit’ and improve the interface and the user experience.
The starting point was knowing that ‘ChatGPT’ is the future
Sharma says that the business was clear what ‘tomorrow’ looked like, “We began to capitalise on our fragmented portal knowledge to try to build something different,” that process began just this spring in March 2024.
By utilising GenAI and ChatGPT-4o to answer HR-related queries driven from their HR database, ROB was developed. The HR tool is built upon structured and positioned answers, it does the job of HR administration – offering policy guidance around holiday allowances or making provisions for recording sickness – the idea is that ROB is the hub to record all those employee notifications. Data is about 90% of AIs success and it’s no different for Bosch’s solution. The shortfall, says Ferhling, is the 5% of data that is not structured or positioned well enough to produce the right answer – yet. For those areas of employee reporting it does the job, however.
Niklas Fehrling
Vice President of HR Digitalisation and Global HR IT
Deepak Sharma
Senior HR IT Project Manager
“For example, if I want to know how much holiday allowance I have got – I go to ROB, and it saves me time and a discussion with my manager. It’s self-service,” explains Ferhling. Access is via a chatbot based on the portal; this is the first entry gate, click-and-type-your-query service. Sharma and Ferhling were keen to instil some personality into ROB as well. They started by giving it a familiar name - one that rolls off the tongue and evokes the sense that it is as much a part of the team as anyone else. The name also ties back to the founder and the business's history. There are soft touches to this HR digital assistant as well – when it responds, there is a polite sign off, ‘Good luck’ it says, leaving Bosch associates feeling aglow with the human touch, while understanding that is anything but. Ferhling explains that part of the development process, alongside adding character to ROB, involved ensuring it is easy to find.
