A Lightweight and Scalable Conversational AI Framework for Intelligent Employee Onboarding

Employee onboarding is a key process in workforce integration but is manual, time-consuming, and departmental. This paper presents OnboardGPT v1.0, an intelligent, scalable conversational AI platform to meet this task with automated and personalized onboarding experience through lightweight neural components. The platform uses a feedforward intent classification model, dense semantic retrieval through cosine similarity, and personalization aware of user profiles to deliver context-sensitive and relevant output. A 500-question proprietary dataset about onboarding and annotated answers was constructed to simulate real enterprise conversations from various roles and departments. The platform was launched with a Flask-based web interface that was not third-party API-dependent and enabled multi-turn dialogue, knowledge base searching, and role-aware task instruction. Experimental evaluation on performance indicators such as task success rate, intent classification accuracy, BLEU score, and user satisfaction in simulation demonstrates the system to be effective in offering coherent and actionable onboarding support. The contribution of this work includes a modular, explainable, and deployable AI pipeline suitable for onboarding automation at the enterprise level and lays the foundation for future extensions that include multilingual support, inclusion of long-term memory, and backend system interoperability.