University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust

The situation

UHCW NHS Trust operates two hospitals serving over a million people across Coventry and Rugby, managing more than 800,000 episodes of care annually. With 10,000 employees spread across these sites, the organisation faced a mounting challenge: routine HR queries from staff created a bottleneck. Pay questions, leave requests, policy clarifications, these transactional enquiries consumed the time of HR professionals who could have been handling complex cases requiring human judgment. The Trust recognised that manual processing was neither sustainable nor a good use of specialist expertise.

The pressure was simple but real. Employees needed answers quickly, HR teams needed capacity, and the organisation knew better systems existed but hadn’t found a path to implementing them that fitted their environment.

What SCC did

Rather than impose a standard tool, SCC spent time understanding UHCW’s specific needs and existing systems. They proposed building People Assist, an AI-powered support tool using Microsoft Azure AI and Power Platform, designed to slot into the Trust’s existing infrastructure without requiring wholesale change.

The tool was built to handle the predictable questions: queries about pay, leave entitlements, policies, and standard procedures. When an employee submitted a query, the system would attempt to resolve it immediately. If the question needed human intervention, the system flagged it for the HR team. This meant straightforward issues got answered in seconds. Complex cases, the ones that actually needed specialist knowledge, reached someone who could help properly.

What changed

Employee satisfaction improved because people got answers without waiting for email responses. The HR team, freed from handling hundreds of routine enquiries each week, could focus on cases that genuinely needed their expertise. Staff got faster responses. HR staff got more meaningful work. Both outcomes mattered.

More significantly, the tool opened a door. Donna Griffiths, Chief People Officer, described it as “the first step as we look to explore how we can advance this resource tool through additional Artificial Intelligence functionality to support other transactional HR processes in the future. This is the start of a people digital transformation journey for UHCW NHS Trust and we are hopeful this will change the way we offer specialist service support to our colleagues.”

What the client learned

The success of People Assist showed UHCW that AI tools didn’t need to be distant, complex, or imposed from outside consultancy. Built thoughtfully, they could become part of how an organisation works. The Trust now sees technology as a path to better use of their staff’s skills rather than a replacement for them. What started as a solution to one problem has become the foundation for rethinking how HR services scale.