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See how IBM partnered with OpenText to automate HR for 280,000 employees, reducing document retrieval times from weeks to just two minutes

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About IBM

IBM is a global technology and consulting leader delivering AI and cloud solutions that help organizations transform operations, enhance workforce experiences, and drive innovation at scale across industries worldwide.
A secure scalable content foundation offering real-time AI-driven HR experiences
  • Employees:
    287,000
  • Customers:
    ~530,000
  • Revenue:
    $67.5 billion (2025)

Summary

Challenges

  • Accessing HR documents manually took up to three weeks.
  • Secure, role-based access was needed for 280,000 employees.
  • Data silos between AI agents and content repositories created inefficiencies.

Solution

  • Deployed OpenText™ Content Management for SAP® SuccessFactors.
  • Integrated OpenText™ Content Aviator™ with IBM AskHR AI assistant.
  • Optimized data ingestion via OpenText™ Professional Services.

Results

  • 40% reduction in HR operating costs
  • 99% faster HR process execution
  • 94% HR inquiry containment rate

Challenges

  • HR documents often took weeks to retrieve
  • 280,000 employees needed secure, trusted access to information
  • AI agents required unified access to fragmented content

IBM set out to transform HR into a modern, digital-first function capable of supporting a global workforce with speed, simplicity, and trust. Employees needed instant, self-service access to essential documents—such as pay slips, tax forms, and verification letters—without waiting days or weeks for manual support.

Historically, retrieving HR documents could take significant time, creating frustration for employees and increasing the operational burden on HR service centers. At IBM’s scale, these delays created inefficiencies across regions and impacted the overall employee experience.

IBM also needed to ensure every interaction met the highest standards of privacy, governance, and compliance. With employees working across dozens of jurisdictions, data had to be managed with strict role-based access controls—while still delivering the kind of intuitive, consumer-grade experience people expect in their daily lives.

“Eliminating friction while maintaining absolute trust in HR data was critical,” said Elaina Chan, Senior Delivery Lead, Automation and AI, IBM. “We needed to ensure data was secure, reliable, and accessible—at global scale.”

To achieve this, IBM required an AI-ready content foundation that could connect people, systems, and documents into a single, seamless experience.

Person using laptop with digital document icons

Today, employees can access pay slips or verification letters in minutes—what used to take weeks. That fundamentally changes the employee experience.

Elaina Chan
Senior Delivery Lead, Automation and AI, IBM

Solution

IBM partnered with OpenText to build a secure, scalable content foundation integrated with SAP® SuccessFactors and IBM’s AskHR digital assistant, enabling real-time, AI-driven HR experiences.

Products deployed

Services provided

A secure, AI-ready content foundation

IBM implemented OpenText Content Management for SAP® SuccessFactors to centralize HR documents across the enterprise. By embedding content management directly into HR workflows, IBM ensured documents were consistently generated, stored, governed, and accessed within SAP® SuccessFactors.

“We need to ensure that when an employee requests a document, it is secure, reliable, and the correct data is returned,” said Chan. “That trust is absolutely essential in HR.”

Transforming the employee experience with AI

IBM integrated OpenText Content Aviator with its AskHR conversational assistant, powered by Watsonx. The result is a unified experience where employees simply ask for what they need—such as a pay slip or verification letter—and AI orchestrates the rest.

“AskHR acts as the experience layer, while OpenText Aviator is the expert agent that interrogates the document storage. When an employee asks for a pay slip, AskHR connects with OpenText, retrieves the document, and returns it within minutes,” Chan explained.

Employees now receive their documents in under two minutes through a conversational chat interface. By prioritizing human-centric AI, IBM created a single entry point for HR services while maintaining strict governance, role-based access, and data privacy.

Driving trust through robust governance

To support AI at scale, IBM implemented rigorous governance frameworks to ensure data privacy, access control, and compliance. This foundation ensures that AI-driven interactions are secure, compliant, and trusted by employees and leadership.

“Every solution goes through strict governance and validation,” said Chan. “If you don’t have the right role or access, you won’t see the data. That level of control is critical.”

A global partnership delivering enterprise scale

Working with OpenText Professional Services, IBM optimized metadata models and ingestion processes, enabling high-volume automation and multi-language support. The system now powers HR operations across dozens of countries, generating more than 200,000 HR letters on demand in 31 languages and managing millions of documents across employee workspaces.

AI technology integrating multiple data systems

We’re building an ecosystem of AI agents that solve business problems together. The goal is to give every IBM employee fast, secure access to their data and a more productive way to work.

Elaina Chan
Senior Delivery Lead, Automation and AI, IBM

Results

With OpenText Content Management for SAP® SuccessFactors and support from OpenText Professional Services, IBM transformed HR into a fast, scalable, AI-powered function with measurable business impact.

99% faster HR document execution

The most visible impact is the dramatic shift in speed. "Last week, I generated a verification letter in two minutes," says Chan. "That used to take weeks. It's a fundamental shift in productivity."

94% HR inquiry containment and 40% lower HR operating costs

AI-powered self-service now resolves the majority of employee inquiries without human intervention. With a 94% containment rate, IBM reduced workload on HR service centers and achieved a 40% reduction in operating costs—while supporting global scale without adding headcount.

C-suite and manager adoption

The intuitive nature of the AI-powered system has led to staggering internal adoption rates: 98% manager adoption, 97% executive adoption, and 11 million annual interactions. This widespread adoption reflects the intuitive, integrated user experience enabled by OpenText and IBM’s AI ecosystem.

The future: Unified AI orchestration

IBM is next integrating AskHR, OpenText Aviator, and SAP® Joule into a tri-agent ecosystem that will enable employees to complete complex HR tasks—such as real-time pay slip analysis—through a single conversational interface.

Future innovations include AI-powered document comparison, expanded automation, and more sophisticated self-service capabilities.

“We’re building a three-way partnership across AI agents to solve more business problems together,” said Chan. “Our goal is simple: give every employee fast, secure access to what they need—and use AI to make work easier, more productive, and more human.”

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