The pharmacy retailer faced a familiar HR problem—teams inundated by email queries
Australia’s largest pharmacy retailer faced an all-too-familiar HR problem — an avalanche of HR email enquiries and a 30% turnover rate within its HR advisory team.
The business, which has more than 500 outlets and about 30,000 employees and store owners needing HR support, had to rethink its approach.
Detailing the transformation project recently on Microsoft’s news platform, Melissa Bear, Head of People and Culture Advisory at Chemist Warehouse shared how a team of six people was dealing with up to 300 email queries a week, including investigations, grievances, and policy and award questions.
“I could see the team were doing a lot of lower-risk repetitive work, and while this work is important to the organisation and employees, it is not necessarily the best use of HR skill and time when the demand is so great,” Bear said.
“I wanted to address our work volume, business and employee needs, and create space for the advisory team to undertake higher-value work that would build their skills and increase enjoyment in their role.”
A new AI team member
Working with Microsoft and Australian AI consulting and engineering firm Insurgence AI, the retailer introduced an AI assistant at the start of 2025 to analyse a specific range of queries sent to the national HR advisory inbox and then draft email responses.
The company estimates the AI assistant can start drafting a response within 30 seconds of a query reaching the national inbox. A team member then reviews and makes changes as needed before sending out the response – a deliberate design decision to keep humans in the process.
Jessi Barberio, Human Resources Business Partner at Chemist Warehouse, said the system integrates with external data sources like Fair Work Australia to access information on awards and enterprise bargaining agreements, as well as internal policies and procedures.
She estimates the AI assistant will save the team about 1,950 hours a year, while she personally estimates its saving 40 percent of her time in managing regular and repetitive queries.
“It gives us more time for higher-value-add work or projects, supporting and coaching our leaders or developing and providing educational content – the latter being something we simply didn’t have the bandwidth to do previously,” she said.
Bear said she does not believe AI is “killing off” early career development and was making the work more interesting for junior HR professionals.
“Part of the vision was not to create an unhealthy reliance on AI or spoon-feed answers to the HR advisory team. I still want and require the team to take the initiative to grow their skills, capability and critical thinking – AI can’t do that for them, but it can free them up to focus on the work that enables the building of those skills.”
This is an edited version of an article originally published by Microsoft and is reproduced here with permission.
