Two internal knowledge systems, published in full by the companies that built them.
Both are unusually well documented, including the parts that did not work. These are their numbers, linked to their sources.
The published limits are more instructive than the headline figures.
IBM AskHR
IBM's internal HR assistant handles routine employee and manager requests: letters, vacation, payroll access, compensation changes. Around 80 automated tasks sit behind it.
of common HR questions answered without escalation, IBM's own containment figure. IBM also reports more than 11.5 million employee interactions in 2024 and a roughly 40% lower HR operating cost over four years.
IBM announced it would triple US entry-level hiring in 2026. An Inc. opinion piece traces this to the remaining 6%: the exceptions and judgement calls the system does not take on.
Uber Genie
Genie is a Slack assistant for on-call engineering questions, built on a retrieval architecture Uber describes in detail. Uber's internal support channels carry around 45,000 questions a month.
of engineering time saved since launch in September 2023, across more than 70,000 questions in 154 Slack channels.
Uber also published the helpfulness rate: 48.9%. Fewer than half the answers were rated helpful, and Genie is described throughout as an on-call copilot rather than a replacement.
A knowledge system is worth building when it can say what it does not know.
The source has to be reachable
Half-useful is still useful
Access follows role
What we do not promise
- That retrieval finds everything. Where it finds nothing, the system should say so rather than fill the gap.
- That the knowledge maintains itself. Retrieval searches; it does not curate.
- That every answer is helpful. The published rate at Uber was 48.9%, and that was still worth running.