OVI is the AI-native ATS where you chat to hire. Two AI agents — Sora for sourcing and Milo for screening — find candidates, score every CV, and run AI interviews, all controlled from a single chat.

What does "chat to hire" mean?

Chat to hire is OVI's AI-native hiring workflow: instead of clicking through a traditional ATS, you describe what you need in chat and OVI's AI agents source candidates, screen applicants, run AI interviews, and send outreach for you.

What is an AI-native ATS?

An AI-native ATS is an applicant tracking system built around AI agents rather than forms and pipelines. OVI's AI chat ATS lets recruiters source, screen, interview, and follow up through conversation — the agents do the work and surface only the candidates worth meeting.

Who are Sora and Milo?

Sora is OVI's AI sourcing agent — she scans LinkedIn, the open web, and your ATS history to find best-fit candidates and reach out in your name. Milo is OVI's AI screening agent — he scores every applicant against your rubric and surfaces a ranked shortlist.

How do OVI's AI interviews work?

OVI runs async AI interviews for every shortlisted candidate and returns scores, transcripts, and recordings — so your team only meets the people worth meeting.

Johnson Controls Cut HR Call Volume by 30–40% Across 100,000 Employees — The Omni Playbook

2026-06-19

Johnson Controls Cut HR Call Volume by 30–40% Across 100,000 Employees — The Omni Playbook

Current date (UTC): 2026-04-01
Current time (UTC): 12:20

When a Fortune 500 company with 100,000 employees reports a 30–40% drop in HR call volume — without adding headcount or new tools — HR leaders should pay attention. Johnson Controls, the $27 billion building-technologies giant, achieved exactly that by deploying an agentic AI assistant called Omni, powered by the Moveworks platform and embedded directly into the workflows its employees already use [1].

What Omni Is — and What It Handles

Omni is a natural-language AI assistant that lives inside Microsoft Teams and integrates with Johnson Controls' Workday instance [1]. Employees ask questions in plain language — about benefits eligibility, pay schedules, PTO balances, policy details — and Omni resolves them instantly, pulling answers from existing HR knowledge bases and systems of record.

The key distinction: Omni is not a chatbot reading from a static FAQ. Built on Moveworks' agentic AI platform, it can reason across multiple data sources and take actions on behalf of employees, such as initiating a leave request or surfacing the correct policy for their specific location and role [2]. CHRO Marlon Sullivan has framed the initiative in terms of employee enablement: "It is really about how do we leverage AI to better empower our employees, where they are able to reach their full potential and what I call, thrive" [5].

How They Deployed: Phased Rollout With Guardrails

Johnson Controls did not flip a switch on day one. The rollout followed a phased approach, starting with high-volume, low-complexity queries — the kind that flood HR service desks and consume disproportionate agent time [1].

The company partnered with Deloitte, with Managing Director Greg Vert leading an AI readiness assessment and change management strategy before launch [1]. Sullivan has been transparent about the caution behind their approach: "We have been very careful. We do want to have all of our employees engage with generative AI and be comfortable with it" [5].

This phased strategy — start with the repetitive, prove value, then expand — mirrors what Assembly Industries identified as the dominant pattern in enterprise HR automation heading into 2026: organizations that succeed with AI in HR operations almost always begin with well-scoped, high-frequency tasks rather than attempting end-to-end process replacement [6].

Outcomes: Measurable, Vendor-Reported

The headline result: a 30–40% reduction in HR call volume across the global workforce (vendor-reported via Moveworks; independent verification is not available) [1]. For a company fielding inquiries from 100,000+ employees across multiple regions and time zones, the operational impact is significant.

Beyond call deflection, Omni replaced multi-day email response cycles with instant resolution [1]. And critically, Johnson Controls achieved this without adding headcount or deploying additional tools — the AI assistant leveraged existing infrastructure (Teams, Workday) rather than requiring a parallel technology stack.

The Platform Signal: ServiceNow's $2.85 Billion Bet

Johnson Controls' results are one data point. The strategic signal came in March 2025 when ServiceNow announced its acquisition of Moveworks for $2.85 billion [4], closing the deal in December 2025 [3].

The acquisition was not primarily about IT service management. ServiceNow and Moveworks reported 250+ joint customers pre-acquisition, with AI agents resolving 90% of IT requests and 89% of customer support requests autonomously [3]. By absorbing Moveworks, ServiceNow is positioning agentic AI as platform-level infrastructure for enterprise operations — including HR.

For HR leaders, the implication is clear: the AI assistant that Johnson Controls deployed as a point solution is becoming embedded in the enterprise platforms they already license. This is no longer an innovation bet. It is a platform migration.

Market Context: AI in HR Operations Is Accelerating

Johnson Controls is not an outlier. According to Assembly Industries' 2026 research, more than 50% of talent leaders plan to add autonomous AI agents to their teams in 2026 [6]. AI usage across HR tasks has climbed to 43% in 2026, up from 26% in 2024, and AI agent deployment has nearly quadrupled — 42% of organizations now have at least some agents in production [6].

The velocity matters. Two years ago, AI in HR was primarily about automating basic administrative workflows and employee self-service portals. Today, it is about handling the operational load — the thousands of routine inquiries, policy lookups, and transactional requests that consume HR service capacity.

The Takeaway for HR Leaders

Johnson Controls' playbook is replicable: start with high-volume, low-complexity HR queries, embed the AI where employees already work (Teams, Slack), integrate with your system of record (Workday, SAP), partner with a change management function, and measure call deflection rigorously.

The 30–40% call volume reduction is vendor-reported and should be treated as directionally informative rather than independently verified. But even at the conservative end, a 30% reduction in HR service desk volume for a 100,000-person organization represents a meaningful shift in how HR operations scale — without scaling headcount.

Sources:

[1] Moveworks Blog: Johnson Controls Scales HR Support with AI for 100,000+ Employees

[2] Moveworks Blog: 4 HR Digital Transformation Case Studies

[3] Moveworks Press Release: ServiceNow Completes Acquisition of Moveworks (Dec 2025)

[4] TechCrunch: ServiceNow to Buy Moveworks for $2.85B (Mar 2025)

[5] LinkedIn: David Forman Post — CHRO Marlon Sullivan on Omni

[6] Assembly Industries: HR Process Automation in 2026

What did Johnson Controls achieve by deploying Moveworks Omni?

Johnson Controls reduced HR call volume by 30–40% across its 100,000+ employee workforce, replacing multi-day email response cycles with instant AI-powered resolution — without adding headcount or new infrastructure.

What is Moveworks Omni and how does it work?

Omni is an agentic AI assistant inside Microsoft Teams integrated with Workday. It resolves HR queries in natural language — benefits, pay, PTO, policy — by reasoning across multiple data sources and taking actions on behalf of employees.

Why did ServiceNow acquire Moveworks for $2.85 billion?

ServiceNow acquired Moveworks in March 2025 (closing December 2025) to embed agentic AI as platform-level infrastructure for enterprise operations. Pre-acquisition, 250+ joint customers saw AI agents resolve 90% of IT and 89% of customer support requests autonomously.