- AI agents are already answering employees about leave, pay and harassment reports, but most went live after only an accuracy and tone check. Their judgment in sensitive people conversations is rarely tested.
- Cornerstone Agent Ready™, tests HR and customer-facing agents against your own code of conduct and policies, and returns a remediation plan for every gap it finds.
- Every assessment produces a findings record counsel and compliance can read, so you can move fast with AI agents without lowering the bar of conduct.
Your AI agents are already answering employees’ questions about leave, pay and harassment reports, and some are starting to talk to customers. Most of them went live after only an accuracy and tone check.
Cornerstone Agent Ready™ helps businesses move fast with AI agents, without lowering the standard of conduct. Grounded in 25 years of Cornerstone training, it tests how your HR and customer-facing agents handle the hard conversations, including how they answer questions about your own conduct standard.
The question nobody tested
Imagine this: an employee opens the HR AI assistant late at night and asks whether her manager will find out if she reports harassment. The agent, built to be warm and reassuring, tells her it will stay between the two of them. Two days later, HR opens an investigation and interviews her manager. The promise breaks the first time anyone acts on her report.
The agent may know the reporting policy word for word. What nobody tested was its judgment: how it handles an upset employee, a manager pushing it to agree, the same question asked five ways, or a gap no policy covers.
Those are the failures that become employee-relations cases. New people leaders complete hours of training before they take these conversations, and you keep the record. Yet the agents handling them at far greater scale typically receive neither.
That leaves most organizations with two bad options. Slow every agent down with manual reviews and committee signoffs and lose the speed that made AI worth it. Or ship fast and turn every new agent into a bet that HR leaders must cover. It shouldn't have to be a choice.
Why today's approaches fall short
Most teams already review their agents in some way, and each approach answers a real question, just not the one your employee-relations team will ask.
- Pre-launch reviews check accuracy and tone just once, before launch. They confirm the agent knows the policy, not how it handles the hard conversation.
- Governance tools, whether from the large platforms or standalone vendors, test security and task accuracy. They answer the security team's questions, not how an agent handles a conversation about your own conduct policies.
- Developer evaluation tools give engineers a test harness but no curriculum. Your team has to invent both the questions and the standard.
None of the approaches answers the question your employee-relations team will eventually get: what did the agent say, and should it have said it? That's why most teams are still choosing between speed and the bar.
Meet Cornerstone Agent Ready™
Cornerstone Agent Ready™ lets you move fast with AI agents, without lowering the bar of conduct. It connects to an agent you already run through the agent's own interface, and doesn't need your model, your prompts or your retrieval store. From there, it does three jobs.
Know how your agents behave
Cornerstone Agent Ready™ starts from a curriculum of subjects, including conduct and harassment, leave and accommodation, pay and hours, privacy and employee data, investigations, and performance and termination conversations. For agents that talk to customers, there's a sales conduct subject too.
Then you make it yours. Load your leave policy, code of conduct, pay rules or sales handbooks. Cornerstone Agent Ready™ turns them into individual testable statements, each with its clause reference, and you decide which ones your agents are tested on.
A full assessment runs several hundred conversations across eleven kinds of test, including incomplete information, ambiguity, appeals to authority, emotional pressure, loaded premises, drift over a long conversation, bias, and questions designed to see whether the agent will invent an answer. Every response is graded against the expected and prohibited behaviors stated for that situation, and the reason is recorded. Models help write and vary the questions. They never decide a verdict.
Remediate what breaks, fast
Every failure comes back with the correction attached, written so your engineers can apply it the same week:
- A written specification with acceptance tests, ready to hand to a coding assistant
- An instruction block for the agent's prompt library, written to the standard it's graded against
- Optionally, a runtime service the agent can call to check an answer before an employee sees it
This is where HR and IT meet. HR sets the standard. Engineers get findings in the format they already work in, so remediation plan go into a sprint instead of a steering committee.
Here’s what a single finding looks like:
Before an assessment record is issued, the agent is retested on wording it hasn't seen. A pass means the behavior changed, not that the agent memorized the test.
Keep the evidence you can stand behind
Each assessment produces a findings record: every conversation, the agent's actual answer, the expected behavior, the verdict and the reason. It's written for HR leaders and works councils to read and question, not only engineers.
Once the agent passes its retest, you get a dated assessment record. It lists the subjects covered, the version of the standard, and what wasn't covered.
Standards keep moving after that, so Cornerstone Agent Ready™ tests again when a policy or the model changes. Move parental leave from 16 weeks to 20, and you'll know whether your agent is still quoting 16.
What an assessment record is, and what it isn't
A passing record means that on a given date, your agent was asked a documented set of questions and behaved in a documented way, and that the gaps found were remediated and retested. It's evidence of diligence, the kind a works council may ask to see.
It isn't a legal opinion, and it doesn't replace your own counsel. It shows how your agent answers questions about your policies. It doesn't determine whether your organization or your employees meet any policy, law or regulation. We'd rather say that plainly up front.
A few other things worth knowing:
- Assessments use synthetic employees and situations, so no employee data is needed.
- Policy documents you upload stay in your tenant. Nothing is used to train foundation models or shared across customers.
- Cornerstone Agent Ready™ is built for agents that talk to people about their work, pay, leave, complaints and careers, and for commercial agents that talk to your customers. An agent that summarizes documents for one analyst doesn't need it.
Why Cornerstone
For 25 years, Cornerstone has helped organizations get their people ready. Cornerstone Agent Ready™ brings that same discipline to the agents now entering the workforces.
Cornerstone Agent Ready™ is part of Cornerstone Workforce AI™. You don't need the rest of the platform to use it. If you're already a Cornerstone customer, the policies, training and standards you hold with us become the basis for the questions your agents are tested on.
Get started
Cornerstone Agent Ready™ is open to customers and prospects today. Cornerstone Workforce AI™ customers can assess one agent at no cost for 12 months.
Attending HR Tech or UNLEASH, October 20–22? Stop by Cornerstone Booth #3922 at HR Tech in Las Vegas or Booth #123 at UNLEASH in Paris to see a live assessment and a sample findings record.
Your people are prepared for the hard conversations before they take them. Now your AI agents can be too. Request a demo to learn more.
