Six tools, one agent — and a platform we had to map ourselves.
HR Studio gives MillerKnoll HR Business Partners one agent for the work that used to mean six — job grading, benefits Q&A, sensitive-case prep, JD coaching, and read-only Workday data. It’s also AISE’s first build on Copilot Studio’s new skills-based experience: new enough that the team had to reverse-engineer how the platform even saves to disk.
What HR Studio brings together
The toolkit HRBPs used to reach across several agents, unified into one — grounded and deterministic where it counts.
The undocumented gotcha only live testing could find
The new experience was new enough that Microsoft hadn’t published how it serializes to disk. So AISE cloned the live DEV agent after every portal change and diffed the result to chart the real format. That surfaced a genuine, non-obvious trap: uploading a skill as a .zip silently strips its instructions at runtime — the agent shows the skill as loaded, but the model only ever sees its name and description, never the methodology inside. Only a bare SKILL.md upload inlines the real content. Nothing in the docs said this; it only showed up by testing the live agent’s actual answers.
Those findings became AISE’s internal new-experience build guide — so the next team starts from a working reference instead of repeating days of trial-and-error.
Three principles
One entry point, many skills
HRBPs interact with a single agent. The six capabilities that were separate child agents in classic Studio HR are re-expressed as skills, tools, and knowledge on one agent — simpler to use and to maintain.
Deterministic grading
Role leveling runs against MillerKnoll’s documented Career Framework, returns a confidence score, and asks clarifying questions when a JD is ambiguous — it never guesses a grade.
Learn the platform, share the map
Being first on a new experience meant reverse-engineering an undocumented format. The lessons were written up as a reusable build guide so the whole team moves faster next time.
Where it stands
HR Studio is in TEST. It has grown well past the original replatform: 11 skills, 29 tools, 19 knowledge sources and 4 automated workflows on a single agent, running GPT-5.5 on the skills-based experience. Job-code and pay-range answers come from Dataverse lookups rather than knowledge search. The OneTrust policy list is cached, which cut a ~42-second lookup to about 2 seconds. Workday lookups are read-only and gated on the user’s explicit acknowledgment. Most of its HR knowledge was written by mining HR’s shared mailboxes (see the case study): 224 draft articles across eight HR domains, each flagged for SME approval before it is treated as final.