Build an event-coordinator AI agent for HR

The first time we ran a multi-day retreat for a fifty-person team, the spreadsheet that held it all together was opened so many times it crashed. RSVPs, dietary notes, flight numbers, who's sharing a cabin with who, who needs an early-arrival ride — all of it lived in one tab, and a single bad sort would have unraveled the week.

The People lead, an HR director two years into her role, told us afterward she didn't want a project manager next time. She wanted a teammate. Specifically, she wanted an AI teammate — something she could text questions to, drop forwarded emails into, and hand off the small recurring tasks that eat a planner's afternoon. We started helping her sketch one, and the result was an event-coordinator agent we've since rebuilt for three other companies.

Here's what surprised us: you don't need much. The agent doesn't need to book flights or sign vendor contracts. What it needs to do is the boring, high-volume stuff that drains the human coordinator before the retreat even starts.

What an event-coordinator agent actually does

Start with the smallest useful loop. Forwarded RSVP emails come in. The agent reads them, extracts attendee name, dietary restrictions, arrival window, and any special requests, and writes them into a single source-of-truth doc. That alone gives back two or three hours a week per coordinator. Then layer on more.

Ours handle three jobs: (1) inbound triage — pulling structured data out of forwarded emails and DMs, (2) reminder rounds — chasing the attendees who didn't respond by Tuesday, in a voice that sounds like the People team and not a robot, and (3) run-of-show updates — when a flight slips or a vendor reschedules, the agent updates the master schedule and notifies only the people affected.

We didn't build any of this from scratch. The fastest path we've found is to start with a hub like Build an Agent, pick a coding stack from the playbooks they keep updated, and ship a rough first version inside a single afternoon. The first version is always janky. That's fine — the HR lead is going to use it for a week and tell you exactly which two things to fix.

Where most People teams get stuck

The hard part isn't the model. It's the inputs and the permissions. Your agent needs to read the right inboxes, write to the right doc, and not accidentally email the CFO that her allergy is peanuts. We solve this in three ways: a dedicated mailbox just for the retreat (so the agent can read everything in there freely), a shared sheet with explicit columns (so the agent has nowhere to hallucinate), and a human-in-the-loop step before any outbound message goes to a real attendee.

The other thing that catches teams: you have to give the agent a voice. We feed ours three or four old emails the People team has actually sent, ask it to match the warmth, and forbid certain phrases (no "reaching out", no "circling back"). When the agent sounds like the team, attendees stop asking who's on the other side of the email — and at that point you have something real.

Start with one event, not a platform

Don't try to build the universal HR agent on day one. Build the one that gets you through your next offsite. Hardcode names, hardcode the venue, hardcode the schedule template. After the event, you'll know which pieces deserve to be generalized and which ones were a one-off. That's how all our useful internal tools have started: embarrassingly specific, then refined.

A good first milestone is the pre-event survey loop. Send it. Chase the stragglers. Roll up the results into a one-page brief for the organizer. If your agent can do that without supervision for one full cycle, you're past the hardest part.