Hudl
- Global sports technology company | 1,500 employees | USA HQ | Large global footprint
- Relevant Technology Stack: Workday, Google Drive, Slack
Key outcomes over six months
- 70% of requests handled by AI without escalation
- 80% of requests meeting first-response SLA targets
- Onboarding coordination cut from 60 to 20 minutes per hire
The challenge: Visibility as the missing piece
Hudl’s HR team supported roughly 1,500 employees without a centralized way to track incoming requests, ownership, or service levels.
Employee questions arrived through direct messages, shared channels, and informal handoffs across the HR team. Routing depended on who noticed a message first. Work could be delayed, duplicated, or lost entirely, and leadership had no reliable visibility into workload, service levels, or where time was actually going.
At the same time, onboarding and lifecycle coordination required significant manual effort. With a lean HR team, continuing the same approach would not scale.
Without clearer visibility and automation, the team could not confidently plan capacity or service delivery.
Why Hudl chose Kinfolk
Hudl explored internal and external options, including a simple chatbot and other FAQ-style tools, that couldn’t handle routing, workflows or anything complex.
Kinfolk was chosen for three reasons:
- Purpose-built for HR’s complex and nuanced workflows
- Kin’s answers grounded in Hudl’s own policies, context, and employee location
- Request handling, knowledge delivery, and onboarding automation all live in one platform. No need to switch between tools.
This HR-specific focus, and powerful agentic capabilities, created confidence the solution could scale with the team, without adding operational overhead.
Implementation: behavior change more than technical lift
Technical implementation was straight-forward but the adoption required a behavioral shift within HR and employees.
For the naturally service-oriented HR teams, the rollout meant trusting the platform to handle routine questions while allowing escalation when needed. The team also guided employees toward the new request entry point in Slack, instead of legacy channels.
Hudl benefited from having previously shifted internal policies and documentation to a modern knowledge base, accelerating deployment.
Kin’s impact after six months
AI is resolving the majority of HR questions
Within six months, Kinfolk was handling 70% of employee HR questions without escalation.
During high-volume periods such as US open enrollment, this included complex and highly specific benefits questions that would previously require direct HR involvement. For the first time, the team could scale support during peak demand without adding headcount or pulling resources from elsewhere.
Centralized routing has improved visibility, reduced lost handoffs, and created measurable service delivery for the first time.
“The goal wasn’t to remove interaction with HR. It’s to empower employees to get the answers they need and involve the right person only when necessary.” — Jason Linkus, Director, HR Operations and Total Rewards
Consistent service delivery without additional hiring
Hudl saw 80% of employee requests meeting their first-response SLA targets, which improved responsiveness and reliability without expanding the HR team.
This led to a shift from anecdotal workload management to measurable HR service delivery:
- Employees can self-serve many policy and process questions.
- HR gains clearer routing, tracking, and auditability.
- Time previously spent answering repetitive requests is redirected toward strategic work.
Meaningful HR capacity created
Kinfolk’s Runbooks are now automating onboarding coordination across new hires. In the past six months, 150 hires have gone through automated runbooks, reducing coordination time from roughly 60 minutes to 20 minutes per hire and standardizing a process that was previously manual and distributed.
The result: scalable HR operations powered by AI and automation
This newly created capacity is allowing Hudl’s HR team to shift focus toward higher-value operational priorities. With all support running centrally through Slack, the team has reliable visibility into what's coming in, who owns it, and how it's being resolved. Employee questions meet a real system, not a support ticket raised into a void or a message that depends on who happens to see it first
“It allowed work to be more focused on both strategic and implementation work rather than repetitive coordination.” — Jason Linkus, Director, HR Operations and Total Rewards
Kinfolk is now foundational to how Hudl delivers HR support as the company scales.