At Ema, we scaled to 100 people without a traditional HR team—not by ignoring HR, but by automating routine work with AI Employees. By letting Agentic AI handle repetitive queries and workflows, human talent can focus on what truly matters: strategy, creativity, and leadership.

The rise of Agentic AI, and software that can understand, reason, plan, and act autonomously, is fundamentally transforming enterprise operations.

At Ema, our core mission has always been eliminating manual, tedious work so that humans can focus on strategic, creative, and high-value initiatives. That mission led us to a bold experiment: scaling a company to 100 employees without a dedicated Human Resources (HR) department—or traditional roles that primarily exist to answer repetitive questions and process requests across Sales, Operations and other functions.

Instead, we let Ema handle it.

Rethinking HR: Why Have People Doing Work That AI Can Do?

HR teams, like many other enterprise functions, often spend a disproportionate amount of time handling administrative tasks rather than focusing on meaningful work. Consider the reality in most organizations:

• Employees wait for answers to simple questions like vacation policies, travel guidelines, and expense reimbursements.
• HR professionals handle repetitive inquiries, preventing them from engaging in more impactful work, like designing better performance improvement frameworks or mentoring leadership.
• Managers are bogged down navigating complex internal systems to answer basic questions from their teams.

Why not let Agentic AI take care of it?

At Ema, instead of hiring HR personnel to respond to these routine queries, we let our AI employee, Ema, take care of it. Employees can just ask Ema—whether they’re in Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Google Chat—and instantly get accurate, up-to-date answers.

Ema does more than just answer questions. She can take action—filing vacation requests, opening tickets in service management systems, updating tasks in project management tools, and more.

The result?

• Faster responses to employees.
• Happier HR teams who can spend more time on enriching employee experience.
• More time for managers to focus on leadership rather than being internal policy encyclopedias.

Scaling Beyond HR: The Future of Enterprise Automation

HR isn’t the only area where we’re testing this AI-first approach. Other departments across enterprises are full of similar inefficiencies.

For example, our sales team doesn’t need to wait for a security specialist to answer questions about compliance for enterprise customers. Instead, they ask Ema: "What are our security policies?" "Can you help me fill out this security questionnaire?"

Ema, having learned from our internal documentation and compliance frameworks, generates accurate, pre-approved responses, ensuring consistency while eliminating wait times, ensuring sales teams can focus on building relationships and closing deals.

We also use Ema’s AI SDR AI SDR (Sales Development Representative) for our own lead generation. Sales teams provide inputs on who to target, and Ema’s SDR AI Employee builds and runs the campaigns with highly personalized reach outs, leading to 5x more bookings without adding headcount

Now, imagine these productivity gains across finance, legal, procurement, IT, and more. Enterprises can scale faster, reduce overhead, and allow human employees to focus on high-impact work—instead of administrative burdens.

The Business Case for AI Employees: Always On, Always Scalable

Unlike human employees, AI doesn’t:

• Take vacations.
• Need breaks.
• Forget things or provide inconsistent responses.
• Quit, requiring costly recruitment and training.

AI employees can:

• Be available 24/7, in any language, across any timezone.
• Scale instantly—without the costs associated with expanding a human workforce.
• Ensure policy consistency—no matter where employees are located.
• Bridge knowledge gaps, helping teams find answers without navigating fragmented internal systems.

This is not about replacing humans but rather augmenting them, enabling employees to focus on what humans do best—creativity, strategy, and leadership.

Agentic AI Is Disruptive — And the Time to Experiment Is Now

There has been a lot of hype around AI transforming enterprise workflows. But at Ema, we’re not just talking about it—we’re living it. Alongside us are some of the world’s leading enterprises, who’ve adopted our horizontal Agentic Business Automation platform and 10x-ed their productivity across Sales and Marketing, Employee Experience, Customer Support, and other functions. The future is one where humans and AI employees work together to drive real business outcomes.

We understand that many enterprises are hesitant—change is hard, and Agentic AI can feel particularly disruptive. But waiting isn’t an option, given that the technology is already here. Early adopters who’ve deployed Agentic AI have already reduced costs, realized results faster, and unlocked new strategic business levers. An incremental approach works best: start by automating a certain percentage of workflows within a given function, and scale until production-grade results are achieved. Experiment in this manner with various functions, and unlock 10x the productivity in your organization.

If you’re ready to rethink how your enterprise operates, book a demo of Ema today.