Your handbook, answering questions. Instead of your HR inbox.
Employees ask in plain English. The chatbot answers from your published handbook and HR policies, cites the exact section, and never gives advice. Data protection controls are designed to support UK GDPR obligations.
Seven-day free trial. No credit card. Includes 5 chatbot sessions.
The questions your team asks HR every week
- “What is the policy on working from home?”
- “How do I book annual leave?”
- “Can I claim expenses for travel to meetings?”
- “What is TOIL?”
Every one of these already has an answer written down. The chatbot finds it, quotes it, and cites the section.
Accurate by design, not by luck.
Generic AI assistants improvise. This one retrieves the relevant sections of your published handbook first and composes its answer only from them, so what employees read is your policy, not a plausible guess.
- Answers sourced only from your published handbook.
- Section citations on every answer, e.g. Annual Leave (5.2).
- Says "I don’t know" and refers to HR when the handbook is silent.
Why UK employers put a chatbot on the handbook.
Cuts the HR inbox
Most policy questions have a clear answer already written in your handbook. The chatbot handles the routine ones instantly, so HR time goes on the situations that need a human.
Every answer cited
Answers quote your published handbook and cite the exact section, so employees can read the full policy and you can see precisely where each answer came from.
Guardrails built in
It gives information, never advice. No invented policies, no "you should...", no answers about other employees. Sensitive topics are referred to HR or a manager.
Always the current version
The chatbot reads your latest published handbook automatically. Update a policy, publish, and every answer reflects the change with no manual sync.
Understands conversation
Employees ask in plain English and follow up naturally. If a question is ambiguous, the chatbot asks which policy they mean rather than guessing.
A handbook worth asking
The chatbot sits on top of Bounda’s compliance engine: the same platform audits your handbook against UK employment law, so the answers rest on policies that are actually right.
Your policies stay your policies.
An HR chatbot reads some of the most sensitive documents in the business, so the data handling matters as much as the answers. Bounda is built for UK GDPR from the ground up.
- ICO-registered, with data encrypted in transit (TLS 1.3) and at rest (AES-256).
- AI processing runs on Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service.
- Your handbook content and employee questions are never used to train AI models.
- The chatbot never answers questions about other employees or individual cases.
- Built for UK law
- Legal citations on every gap
- ICO registered
- Encrypted in transit and at rest
- Word and PDF export
- Cancel anytime
Questions employers ask about the chatbot
What is an employee handbook chatbot?
It is an AI assistant that answers employee questions about company policy directly from your handbook. Instead of emailing HR or digging through a PDF, an employee asks in plain English ("how do I book annual leave?") and gets an accurate answer in seconds, with a citation to the handbook section it came from.
How does the Bounda chatbot avoid making things up?
It only answers from your published handbook, using retrieval-augmented generation: the relevant handbook sections are found first, and the answer is composed from them with citations. If the handbook does not cover something, the chatbot says so and directs the employee to HR rather than guessing.
Will it give employees legal or HR advice?
No. The guardrails are strict: it provides information from your policies, never recommendations or advice. For sensitive topics like disciplinary, grievance or health matters, and for anything needing judgement about an individual situation, it directs the employee to their manager or HR.
What happens when we update a policy?
Publish the new handbook version in Bounda and the chatbot uses it immediately. There is no separate knowledge base to maintain and no manual sync, so answers never lag behind the policies.
Do we need to already have a good handbook?
No, that is what the rest of Bounda is for. Paste in whatever you have and the platform checks it against 15+ UK legislation sources, flags every gap ranked by severity, and drafts compliant fixes. Publish the result and the chatbot sits on top of it.
Does it work for individual HR policies, not just a handbook?
Yes. The published handbook in Bounda is your set of HR policies, so anything in it is answerable: sickness absence, flexible working, disciplinary procedure, expenses, parental leave and the rest. If you only have a few standalone policies today, paste those in, publish, and the chatbot covers exactly what you published.
How does the chatbot support UK GDPR obligations?
Bounda is ICO-registered and uses technical and organisational controls designed to support UK GDPR obligations. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest, AI processing runs on Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service, and your handbook content and employee questions are not used to train AI models. Full details are in our privacy policy.
Could we just build our own handbook chatbot?
You can wire a language model to a folder of policy documents in an afternoon. The hard parts are everything after that: guardrails that stop it giving advice, citations back to the exact section, keeping answers in sync every time a policy changes, and making sure the policies it answers from are legally correct in the first place. Bounda ships all of that, sitting on a compliance engine that checks the underlying policies against UK employment law.
Can employees use it in Microsoft Teams or Slack?
Today, the standard product gives employees the chatbot through your published Bounda handbook. Enterprise customers can discuss a scoped private API, Teams, Slack, or intranet implementation configured through onboarding; productised public API and self-service integrations remain roadmap milestones.
How much does it cost to try?
Nothing. The seven-day trial needs no credit card and includes 5 chatbot sessions on your own published policies. After those sessions, upgrade to Professional or Enterprise for a monthly chatbot allowance.
Learn more before you try it
How the Handbook Chatbot works
The step-by-step guide: retrieval, guardrails, citations and tips for good answers.
Employee handbook software
The platform underneath: audit an existing handbook or build a compliant one from scratch.
Employment Rights Act 2025
What UK employers must change in 2026 and 2027, and which policies are affected.
Ask it something your team asked HR this week.
Bring your handbook in, publish it, and try 5 chatbot sessions free for seven days. Upgrade for a monthly allowance.