Medtronic's workforce doesn't share the same employment experience: an employee building medical devices on a manufacturing line in one country works under a different works council arrangements,  regulatory framework, and set of benefits than a colleague three time zones away. For years, getting a straight HR answer meant sorting through content that mostly didn't apply, or waiting for someone who could translate it. Across a global workforce of more than 95,000 employees, Medtronic saw an opportunity to simplify that experience and make HR support more accessible and relevant to each employee.

Medtronic didn’t need another place for employees to ask questions. It needed one front door—a single consumer-grade point of entry that tailors the answer to who was asking.

One HR knowledge base couldn’t speak for every local employment arrangement and regulatory framework Medtronic runs on

Medtronic could keep adding HR staff to keep pace with a workforce spread across dozens of countries and contract types, or it could rethink how HR information found its way to people in the first place. The company chose the smarter path. The result was HRmony: an AI assistant built on Moveworks and delivered through HR Service Delivery. Rather than functioning as another chatbot, HRmony delivers more personalized support based on each employee’s needs and circumstances.

“For routine tasks, high-volume tasks, let AI be your takeout,” says Kunal Sethi, VP, HR & Finance Digital Technologies and Enablement at Medtronic. It’s a simple rule, but it’s the one that shaped everything HRmony does, and doesn’t, do.

Medtronic enabled an AI assistant that automates the routine tasks and hands off to a human agent when judgment is needed

HRmony handles routine requests end to end: submitting them, resolving them, closing them out. Take performance goal-setting, a process that traditionally involved multiple steps and communications. Now an employee tells HRmony their priorities, and it translates that into smart goals in the flow of the conversation. HRmony asks whether to submit those goals to Workday. Once approved, it pings the employee’s manager, summarizes the goals, and offers times to schedule the conversation. And the whole exchange, from goal-setting to a calendar invite, happens without either party writing an email.

Because HRmony is grounded in Medtronic’s actual systems and rules: the org chart, the policy library, Workday itself, it’s not just retrieving an answer from a knowledge base.  The intelligence is embedded in the work, not layered on top of it. For example, HRmony completes processes like performance goal setting consistently every time by following its pre-defined workflows and compliance rules.

That’s the model behind every use case: automate the parts that don’t require human judgment and route everything else straight to a person. “More complex moments that matter by design—we don’t want AI to step into those areas,” Sethi says. “We definitely want to keep the human in the loop for ethical judgment, for more important moments that matter.”

By meeting deskless workers where they are, Medtronic gave every employee the same level of support

More than half of Medtronic's global workforce doesn't sit at a desk. For manufacturing employees, that used to mean HR support required stepping away, queuing up, or finding a supervisor. Now an agent reachable by QR code posted at its sites lets them get the same answer without leaving the floor. “Employees can instantly, in the moment, engage with AI to navigate their queries, to complete tasks,” Sethi says. The experience finally matches what desk-based employees have always had.

Medtronic exceeded its deflection goal and expanded its vision for AI-powered workflows

The numbers describe an HR function operating at a different scale than before. Medtronic aimed for a 30% call deflection but has already reached 80%, meaning four out of five HR tickets that once required a person now resolve themselves, freeing HR staff for the work that actually needs a human. Since launch, the platform has saved 6,000 hours, time redirected toward the parts of the job that AI can't do. And rather than one tool solving one problem, Medtronic's team built a comprehensive three-year roadmap encompassing 200 digital use cases by job.  Within the first year alone, 60+ of those use cases are already live in production, delivering measurable impact across the organization.

The clearest sign the experience is working: “We actually killed our email channel,” Sethi says. “No escalations – I’m really surprised that scale of transformation and change happened without much noise from any pocket of the world.”

At Medtronic, autonomous HR means HRmony handles the routine, so people can handle everything AI shouldn’t.