Are you ready to revolutionize your PeopleSoft Human Capital Management system? The PeopleSoft product management team is currently working on an Absence Management chatbot for PeopleSoft Human Capital Management that will make absence management easier for every employee.

Chatbots are one of the four new and exciting initiatives within PeopleSoft. Other initiatives include Position Management, Delegation, and Drop Zones.

“Everyone knows about Chatbots in their regular lives, and we want to bring it to the enterprise.”

—Robbin Velayedam, Director of Product Management, PeopleSoft HCM Application

Why Customers Want Chatbots

PeopleSoft customer feedback suggested that chatbots are wanted for the following reasons:

• Improving administrator productivity by offloading routine requests to a chatbot
• Scaling better since chatbots can handle more inquiries
• Expecting the chatbot user experience to meet user expectations and show that you are a forward-thinking organization
• Attracting millennial talent—this generation tends to prefer the chatbot experience over phone conversations
• It’s the future
• Chatbots are successful in other areas of your organization

How the Absence Management Chatbot Works

Chatbots use machine learning to help employees look up information and take action through a chat interface. The Chatbot for Absence Management is powered by the Oracle Digital Assistant, which identifies entities and intents.

PeopleSoft Absence Management enables users to:

• Request or cancel absence requests
• Check the status of absence requests
• View current or forecast absence balances

The chatbot supports all absence types.

The basics of the chatbot include a messaging application housed in PeopleSoft. The chatbot framework is made of natural language processing (NLP) and dialog flow, and the source systems include a knowledge base and data storage.

The language component includes utterances and intent.

Utterances are common statements or sample data for an intent. These do not have to be exact string matching, but the better the quality of utterance, the more accurate the intent engine.

Intents are derived from customer input and answer the question, “What does the user want?” Examples of intent include:

• Checking leave balance
• Applying for leave
• Canceling leave requests

Entities are variables or parameters for intents. They are essentially data points that need to be collected from the user in order to carry out a transaction. They add relevance to the input and map to a domain object.

For example, if a user is applying for leave, the chatbot needs to know what kind of leave—vacation, sick, or earned. The chatbot also needs to collect derived entities—those that are built-in or standard. When applying for leave, the chatbot needs to know the dates or days of the week for the leave. Without that information, the chatbot cannot fulfill the user’s request.

All of these mappings must occur for every bot that you create. They utterances, intents, and entities established will clearly differ between bots for different applications, but they must be established in order for the chatbot to function.

Benefits of the Absence Management Chatbot

When the Absence Management application is used, both employees and HR teams receive benefits. The Absence Management chatbot can simplify mundane tasks like requesting, canceling, or editing absences. It can also provide quick responses to typical inquiries like current or forecast absence balances, accruals, statuses of absence requests, request details, and forecasting.

Say goodbye to manual, inefficient responses to absence inquiries. When you utilize the new Chatbot, all employees will benefit.

Requirements for Using the Absence Management Chatbot

If your company is interested in adding the Absence Management Chatbot to your PeopleSoft system, you will need the following:

• PeopleSoft HCM 9.2
• PeopleTools 8.57
• Oracle Digital Assistant from Oracle Cloud applications

In the future, the PeopleSoft product team is considering chatbots for additional PeopleSoft applications like Company Directory, paychecks, job openings, applying for jobs, navigation, and more.