Agentic AI
An HR agent that writes its own paperwork
Text-prompt automation for letters, onboarding checklists and worklogs — built on Sheets, Apps Script and an LLM.
- Context
- Cowlar Design Studio
- Role
- Designer and builder
- Timeline
- 2024 – 2025
Problem
HR document work is high-volume, highly templated and low-judgement — exactly the shape of task that consumes disproportionate human time.
Approach
A prompt-driven agent over Sheets-as-database with Apps Script for document generation, storage and retrieval, plus Slack integrations for compliance workflows.
Result
Letters, checklists and worklogs generated on request; worklog output fed directly into the billing pipeline.
Why Sheets instead of a CRM
The unglamorous but correct answer: because it was faster to change.
The processes were not stable. A conventional HR system forces you to model your process before you understand it, then charges you for the parts you don’t use. Sheets plus Apps Script let the data model move as the process moved, and gave me a scripting surface with native access to documents, storage and email.
The trade-off is real and I’d state it plainly in an interview — this approach doesn’t scale past a certain headcount, and it has weaker access control than a proper system. It was the right choice for the size and the speed of change, and it would be the wrong choice at several hundred employees.
What it did
- Generated experience, employment and warning letters from a prompt
- Produced onboarding checklists per role
- Maintained employee worklogs — which mattered beyond HR, because they fed the billing system’s project-hours data
- Managed document storage and directory structure automatically
- Read from and wrote back to the company database
The connection to billing
The worklogs are the interesting seam. HR paperwork and revenue look unrelated until you notice that in a services business, the record of who worked on what is simultaneously an HR artifact and a billing input. Automating it once, cleanly, served both — and removed a manual re-entry step that was a standing source of billing errors.
That’s the pattern I keep returning to: the highest-value automation usually sits where two departments are maintaining the same fact separately.