About CPS
Chicago Public Schools is the nation’s third‑largest K‑12 district, serving tens of thousands of staff members across hundreds of schools. The department plays a critical role in supporting educators and administrative personnel, handling everything from benefits enrollment to onboarding. The HR help desk fields hundreds, even thousands, of inquiries every month. Growing ticket volume and rising service expectations pushed CPS’s HR leaders to find an automated solution that could scale fast, protect sensitive data, and free staff for higher-value work.
Challenge
The CPS HR team faced strict limitations on expanding headcount and was overwhelmed by a constant stream of repetitive employee questions—benefits deadlines, policy clarifications, contract language—all arriving through existing support channels. Slow average response times eroded employee satisfaction and consumed hundreds of expensive labor hours. Searching for answers across scattered documents and shared drives further compounded inefficiencies. Amid a tight fiscal environment, the district needed an automated solution to reduce operational burden, improve information access, and scale support efficiently across departments.
Solution
CPS implemented a CustomGPT.ai-powered AI assistant trained on internal HR documentation to provide fast, 24/7 self-service support to employees. Deployed across key access points, the HR assistant was designed to handle policy-based queries with high accuracy, reducing dependency on manual HR responses. The implementation required no coding and was fully integrated with their internal systems within days.
CPS found that CustomGPT.ai’s solution was uniquely positioned to meet their needs for a few key reasons:
No-code builder: CustomGPT.ai’s easy to use platform allowed their team to drag, drop, and sync their hundreds of policy files and guides without any technical expertise, creating their HR support assistant in minutes. With a few more clicks, CPS’s HR team fine-tuned the assistant’s tone and design to perfectly align with the district’s identity and goals.
Industry-leading accuracy: High-accuracy responses allowed HR teams to stay focused on high-value work, without the burden of correcting incomplete or inaccurate AI answers. CustomGPT.ai’s industry-leading accuracy and exceptional ticket deflection rates provided CPS the peace of mind that labor costs could remain low without compromising the quality of HR support. With CustomGPT.ai, every answer is generated by retrieving the exact information from a private knowledge base, ensuring contextual accuracy with clickable citations.
Enterprise-level security: CustomGPT.ai’s RAG technology retrieves CPS’s information from secure vector databases where their data is protected from leakage and never used to train large language models. Additionally, CustomGPT.ai’s platform is fully SOC-2 compliant and built with enterprise-grade security. CPS can rest easy knowing their data stays protected—shared only when, where, and with whom they choose.
Results
One year out, the numbers speak for themselves. This year, CPS’s HR assistant has handled 13,495 queries with a 91% success rate—a figure 20%+ above the industry average. The assistant resolved 12,345 queries without human intervention, saving an estimated 600+ hours of staff time and $25,000 in HR support costs. The bot also reduced average response time from 3 minutes to 10 seconds, making HR support 18× faster.
Qualitatively, the CustomGPT.ai-powered assistant has shifted CPS’s HR culture from reactive ticket triage to proactive talent strategy. Specialists now spend their reclaimed hours on coaching principals, refining hiring pipelines, and updating policies—work that directly supports CPS’s educational mission. Morale is up on both sides of the help desk, as HR professionals find more time for driving meaningful change while employees enjoy fast, accurate answers. Early success has also built strong momentum and organizational trust in AI, leading to buy-in from leadership for cross-department expansion. CPS now sees AI as a cornerstone of its cost reduction strategy and digital modernization goals.
Why it Worked
CPS’s success with CustomGPT.ai came down to three key factors: implementation speed, intelligent automation, and enterprise-grade trust.
- Fast, no-code deployment: With no engineers required, CPS’s HR team launched their assistant in days—not months. CustomGPT.ai’s intuitive, no-code interface lets non-technical staff upload, organize, and refine hundreds of policy documents with ease, turning static HR materials into dynamic, searchable knowledge.
- Accuracy that builds confidence: By retrieving answers directly from verified source documents, the assistant delivered policy-accurate responses with citation transparency. This dramatically reduced the risk of misinformation and built organizational trust in the assistant’s capabilities—both for employees and leadership.
- Secure by design: CustomGPT.ai’s RAG architecture ensured data privacy by retrieving content from secure vector storage. With SOC-2 compliance and zero training on customer data, the platform met CPS’s stringent information security and privacy standards from day one.
Together, these features enabled CPS to deflect routine tickets at scale, cut hard costs, and redeploy expert HR time to more strategic, people-first initiatives.
Conclusion
CPS’s HR transformation demonstrates the real-world value of targeted, secure generative AI for HR teams. In just one year, their AI assistant delivered 600+ hours in reclaimed time, $25,000 in savings, and 91% ticket deflection—all without a single line of code. But perhaps more importantly, the project sparked a cultural shift: HR specialists now spend less time answering policy questions and more time enabling the workforce. With measurable success and cross-department buy-in, CPS has laid a foundation to expand generative AI district-wide—positioning CustomGPT.ai not just as a support tool, but as a strategic lever for operational excellence.
