talenttrends Ask

One question is enough

talenttrends Ask, the agentic AI for Cornerstone, gives managers, HR business partners and approvers instant answers about Cornerstone data — in natural language, limited to their permissions. Instead of just answering, Ask plans each request in steps, queries your data in a targeted way and corrects itself until the answer holds. Embedded in Cornerstone, fed from the talenttrends Data Hub. No reporting ticket, no analyst in between, no report to build.

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talenttrends Ask, your agentic AI for Cornerstone data

The problem

Report­ing is the bot­tle­neck today

Cor­ner­stone has data on every­thing — peo­ple, learn­ing, skills, per­for­mance, recruit­ing. Any­one who needs an answer either builds a report them­selves (if they have the per­mis­sion) or rais­es a tick­et with the few peo­ple who can. Both take time. Both delay deci­sions. And both turn every oper­a­tional need into a small IT project.

Reporting as a bottleneck

Answers to sim­ple ques­tions take days. By then, the deci­sion has long been made infor­mal­ly — on the basis of gut feel­ing rather than data.

Dependence on reporting experts

A hand­ful of peo­ple know how to build Cor­ner­stone reports. When they are on hol­i­day, the com­pa­ny is left star­ing at its own data.

Manual exports and Excel tinkering

Data is export­ed from Cor­ner­stone, processed in Excel, dis­trib­uted by email. No audit trail is cre­at­ed, and no cur­ren­cy either.

Missed risks, missed opportunities

When the answer comes three days too late, the ques­tion has resolved itself — and the com­pli­ance gap has already opened.

Examples

The ques­tions that wait two days today — answered in seconds

tal­ent­trends Ask reach­es across the entire Cor­ner­stone foot­print — Core HR, Learn­ing, Skills, Per­for­mance, Recruit­ing, Com­pen­sa­tion, Onboard­ing and Forms. Here are the ques­tions we see with our cus­tomers every day.

Compliance & risk

  • “Which teams are at risk of not com­plet­ing manda­to­ry train­ing in time?”
  • “Which cer­ti­fi­ca­tions expire in the next 90 days?”

Learning & development

  • “Show me train­ing com­ple­tions by depart­ment in the last quarter.”
  • “Which ILT ses­sions have the high­est can­cel­la­tion rate this quarter?”

Performance & skills

  • “How are the per­for­mance reviews dis­trib­uted across my organ­i­sa­tion­al unit?”
  • “Which employ­ees had skill X val­i­dat­ed in the last six months?”

Recruiting & Workforce

  • “In which OUs are the most posi­tions cur­rent­ly open?”
  • “How many can­di­dates are cur­rent­ly in the DACH region’s tal­ent pools?”

Answers are deliv­ered in the lan­guage of the ques­tion — Ger­man, Eng­lish, French and more. Tables, charts and expla­na­tions are pre­sent­ed in what­ev­er way suits the question.

How it works

Con­nect, ask, get answers

01

Connect

tal­ent­trends Ask con­nects to your Cor­ner­stone por­tal via the offi­cial Cor­ner­stone data inter­faces — either via direct API access or via the tal­ent­trends inte­gra­tion from the Cor­ner­stone Edge Mar­ket­place. Cor­ner­stone data lands in the tal­ent­trends Data Hub, which tal­ent­trends Ask works on.

02

Ask

Embed­ded in your Cor­ner­stone por­tal as a cus­tom page. Sin­gle sign-on via Cor­ner­stone itself — no sec­ond login, no sec­ond cre­den­tials. Ready-made exam­ple ques­tions low­er the bar­ri­er to entry; the input field at the bot­tom takes any ques­tion in any language.

03

Get answers

Answers come in sec­onds. Behind the scenes, Ask works agen­ti­cal­ly: it breaks your ques­tion down into steps, selects the appro­pri­ate data sources, for­mu­lates the query, checks the result and cor­rects itself if some­thing isn’t right — until the answer is reli­able. Tables, charts or nat­ur­al lan­guage, depend­ing on the ques­tion. Fol­low-up ques­tions refine the answer with­out rebuild­ing the con­text (“now bro­ken down by region”, “and only for man­agers”). The con­ver­sa­tion his­to­ry is acces­si­ble via the menu at the top left.

What makes talenttrends Ask different

Your choice, your data, your rules

Oth­er AI tools for HR data are Chat­G­PT wrap­pers with Excel export. Ask is built dif­fer­ent­ly — on three pil­lars that togeth­er pre­vent what goes wrong with gener­ic AI tools.

The model — Your LLM, your choice

tal­ent­trends Ask is provider-neu­tral by design. You choose which lan­guage mod­el runs behind Ask, and switch with­out an archi­tec­ture change.

  • Azure AI Foundry in talessio’s EU ten­ant (Swe­den Cen­tral) — EU data residency
  • AWS Bedrock with EU infer­ence (Frank­furt) — EU data residency
  • Bring your own LLM — infer­ence entire­ly under your control

The LLM lay­er is an imple­men­ta­tion detail, not an archi­tec­tur­al promise. When a bet­ter mod­el becomes avail­able tomor­row, you switch — your pipeline stays.

The data — Processed where you decide

Prompts, con­text and answers are processed in infra­struc­ture that you con­trol. What reach­es the LLM is trans­par­ent­ly governed:

  • No ven­dor train­ing with your data — con­trac­tu­al­ly excluded
  • PII fil­ter before every prompt — fields marked as PII nev­er go to the model
  • Query results remain in your envi­ron­ment by default; the mod­el does not see them
  • Option­al­ly avail­able: Result-Aware Mode for rich­er visu­al­i­sa­tions, under the same provider boundaries

The guardrails — Grounded in your Cornerstone data

Agen­tic does­n’t mean uncon­trolled. The agent may plan and query inde­pen­dent­ly — but only with­in clear­ly set bound­aries. Every answer is ground­ed in your real Cor­ner­stone data, lim­it­ed to the per­mis­sions of the request­ing user, and ful­ly traceable.

  • Per­mis­sions from Cor­ner­stone are enforced serv­er-side — no one can gain more vis­i­bil­i­ty through prompts
  • Read-only by design — tal­ent­trends Ask can­not change Cor­ner­stone data under any circumstances
  • Val­ues come from data, not from the mod­el — fig­ures and tables are deter­min­is­tic, not hallucinated
  • “I don’t know”* by design — when a ques­tion lies out­side the data scope, Ask says so hon­est­ly instead of invent­ing a plau­si­ble-sound­ing answer

Prerequisites

What you should coor­di­nate with us

An hon­est roll­out of AI in an HR con­text takes more than tech­nol­o­gy into account. Three top­ics that we clar­i­fy togeth­er with you dur­ing onboarding.

Cornerstone setup

tal­ent­trends Ask needs data access to your Cor­ner­stone por­tal — either via acti­vat­ed Cor­ner­stone data inter­faces (Data Exporter API, option­al­ly Report­ing API) and a ded­i­cat­ed ser­vice account, or via the tal­ent­trends inte­gra­tion from the Cor­ner­stone Edge Mar­ket­place. The lat­ter is the faster route, because authen­ti­ca­tion and scope are pre-configured.

Account for co-determination

In Ger­many, intro­duc­ing Ask qual­i­fies as intro­duc­ing a tech­ni­cal sys­tem with­in the mean­ing of the Works Con­sti­tu­tion Act — and typ­i­cal­ly trig­gers con­sul­ta­tion and co-deter­mi­na­tion rights for the works coun­cil. We pro­vide the doc­u­men­ta­tion you need for these con­ver­sa­tions. You lead the works coun­cil process your­self, not us.

Acceptable use policy

tal­ent­trends Ask is deci­sion sup­port, not a deci­sion sys­tem. Your con­tract with us stip­u­lates: no per­son­al data in prompts, no per­son­nel deci­sions on the basis of Ask, no auto­mat­ed pro­fil­ing. These rules are made per­ma­nent­ly vis­i­ble in the Ask inter­face — as part of com­pli­ance with GDPR and the EU AI Act.

Deployment

Your data, your infra­struc­ture, your LLM

tal­ent­trends Ask runs on the tal­ent­trends plat­form and fol­lows its three host­ing paths. In addi­tion, you choose your lan­guage mod­el independently.

SaaS with talessio

Ful­ly oper­at­ed by us. Fastest time-to-val­ue. Host­ing in Azure Ger­many West Cen­tral or with STACKIT — EU data res­i­den­cy, Schrems II-compliant.

In your cloud

Deploy­ment in your own cloud sub­scrip­tion — Azure, AWS, GCP or Open­Stack. Full con­trol over net­work and data residency.

On-Premises

Runs in your own data cen­tre. Max­i­mum con­trol. Your data nev­er leaves your infrastructure.

LLM choice configurable separately

LLM option
EU data residency
Suitable for
Azure AI Foundry (Sweden Central)

Stan­dard for Azure-affine customers

AWS Bedrock (Frankfurt, eu-central‑1)

Stan­dard for mul­ti-cloud customers

Bring Your Own LLM

under your control

High­est sov­er­eign­ty, your own model

Details under Secu­ri­ty & Com­pli­ance. Details on host­ing choice, respon­si­bil­i­ties and migra­tion between mod­els can be found under Cloud & On-Premis­es.

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Interested?

See Ask in live operation

30 min­utes, no oblig­a­tion. We’ll show you tal­ent­trends Ask against our sand­box envi­ron­ment or — if you wish — against a test con­nec­tion to your own Cor­ner­stone por­tal. And we’ll dis­cuss what a roll­out would look like in your con­text — includ­ing the works coun­cil path and LLM choice.

Arrange a call

hello@​talessio.​com