Applaud is an HR Service Delivery platform that helps organizations make HR support easier to access and easier to manage.
Employees and managers can find information, complete supported HR tasks, follow guided processes, and get help from HR all through the experiences and channels you provide.
Applaud brings AI, knowledge, case management, journeys, and no-code configuration together so HR can deliver services without requiring people to navigate multiple systems.
Key features
AI assistant
The AI assistant is the primary way employees and managers can get AI-powered help.
Depending on your configuration, it can:
- Understand requests in natural language.
- Answer questions using approved organizational knowledge and provide sources where supported.
- Use connected tools to retrieve live information or complete supported HR tasks.
- Generate documents and start or continue workflows.
- Delegate work to specialist agents for specific domains, countries, or processes.
- Hand work to HR when a person needs to take over.
Actions are governed by the tools, permissions, and controls you configure. Higher-risk actions can require confirmation or additional review.
HR Case Management
Case Management helps HR teams handle requests that need human involvement, including complex, sensitive, or unresolved issues.
The platform can:
- Create cases from conversations or forms.
- Use AI to support intake, triage, summaries, drafting, and case plans.
- Keep relevant conversation context with the case.
- Route and prioritize cases.
- Track SLAs and case progress.
AI supports HR agents but does not replace them. HR remains responsible for decisions and public responses.
Knowledge Management
Knowledge Management provides a central place to create, organize, and maintain HR content.
The AI assistant can use this content to ground answers in approved information.
Knowledge Management helps you:
- Create and manage policies, how-to articles, FAQs, and other HR content.
- Index uploaded documents and connected sources such as SharePoint.
- Target content to different audiences and countries.
- Review and maintain content so the information available to employees stays current.
Journeys
Journeys guide employees, managers, and HR through structured, multistep experiences.
Common uses include onboarding, offboarding, internal moves, long-term leave, and performance processes.
Journeys can:
- Break processes into stages and tasks.
- Give different participants their own tasks and views.
- Assign actions across teams and systems.
- Show progress and what needs to happen next.
Journeys are designed for longer lifecycle experiences. Agentic workflows are designed for specific processes that the AI assistant can start or complete, such as a leave request or approval process.
Employee portal
The employee portal provides a personalized place to access HR services on the web and mobile.
It brings services such as:
- AI assistance
- Knowledge
- Requests and forms
- Journeys
- HR services from connected systems
The portal is one way to access Applaud. Depending on your configuration, employees can also use the AI assistant through Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Outlook.
Creator Platform
The Creator Platform gives HR and HRIS teams no-code tools to adapt Applaud to their organization's needs.
You can use it to:
- Build pages, forms, and employee experiences.
- Create and configure services.
- Configure agents, tools, and workflows.
- Manage access and other platform settings.
- Publish changes without custom development.
IT can provide governance and oversight while HR teams adapt services as their needs change.
How it works together
These capabilities work together to help employees move from a question or request to the appropriate outcome.
For example:
- An employee asks a question through the AI assistant.
- The assistant searches approved knowledge or identifies a supported action.
- It can retrieve live information, complete an action, or start a workflow.
- If the request needs HR involvement, it can create or continue a case with the relevant context.
- The employee receives the answer, action, or next step in the same experience.
Not every request follows the same path. A simple policy question might be answered immediately from knowledge, while a more complex request might involve a tool, workflow, specialist agent, or HR case.
The result is a connected HR experience: employees can get answers and complete supported tasks without having to understand which underlying system or HR process is responsible for making it happen.