Applaud rebuilds HR platform using generative AI on Amazon Bedrock
Learn how Applaud rebuilt its HR platform with Amazon Bedrock to accelerate innovation and improve engineering productivity.
Using generative AI on AWS has transformed our engineering productivity. We’re innovating faster than ever.
Duncan Casemore
Chief Technology Officer and Cofounder, ApplaudOverview
Applaud, a software-as-a-service provider specializing in human resources (HR) service delivery, recognized that traditional HR technology created friction for employees navigating complex, fragmented interfaces. When generative artificial intelligence (AI) emerged as a transformative technology, Applaud chose to rebuild its entire platform around AI using Amazon Web Services (AWS). Using large language models (LLMs) on AWS, Applaud transformed its engineering productivity, accelerated innovation cycles, and delivered enterprise-grade AI capabilities with the flexibility, resilience, and data residency requirements that its business demanded.
About Applaud
Founded on a “people first, technology second” philosophy, Applaud develops intelligent HR tools for mid-to-large enterprises that remove friction between employees and HR systems.
Opportunity | Using Amazon Bedrock for Applaud’s AI innovation
Applaud’s existing software included traditional components like knowledge bases, employee portals, rules-based chatbots, and onboarding modules. However, these legacy solutions created constraints that limited the company's ability to innovate rapidly to meet the needs of HR employees and those that they serve. “AI is such a transformative shift that we didn’t want to be constrained by historical thinking, technical debt, or functional limitations,” says Duncan Casemore, chief technology officer and cofounder of Applaud. “We chose to rethink our platform through the lens of AI so that it was future-proof, adaptable, and capable of unlocking the full potential of generative AI.”
Applaud needed enterprise-grade flexibility, resilience, and cost efficiency, with strong data privacy and in-region residency capabilities. Equally important was the ability to abstract foundation models so that Applaud could easily swap or upgrade them per use case, accounting for both continued innovation and financial considerations. When LLMs emerged, Applaud recognized an opportunity to build a completely new, AI-based software architecture that would position the company as a leader in the next generation of HR technology.
Solution | Building an AI-based architecture using Amazon Bedrock
During an internal hackathon, engineering teams demonstrated how generative AI could transform Applaud’s platform. The results were so compelling that leadership decided to rebuild the entire software suite around generative AI within a single 4-month release cycle, using AWS as its foundation. “We very quickly realized that AWS could provide the enterprise-grade resilience that our customers would demand, as well as meet their data residency needs,” says Casemore. Data residency was a non-negotiable requirement, particularly for United Kingdom and European Union operations, given that Applaud’s large enterprise customers operate globally with very high security and privacy requirements for HR data.
Applaud’s new platform is powered by Amazon Bedrock, a comprehensive, secure, and flexible service for building generative AI applications. The platform uses Anthropic’s Claude in Amazon Bedrock—specifically, Claude Sonnet—for conversational AI through both retrieval-augmented generation and agentic orchestration. It also uses Amazon Titan Text Embeddings models to generate text embeddings that facilitate semantic search in Applaud’s vector database.
The architecture spans three core modules. The AI Assistant and Search module uses Claude Sonnet for conversational AI and Amazon Titan embeddings for semantic search for natural language queries in over 40 languages with zero-click answers. The Knowledge Management module uses Amazon Bedrock to analyze and score HR content for accuracy, bias, tone, and coverage gaps while helping teams write and amend content quickly with contextual awareness. The Case Management module employs Amazon Bedrock for conversational case creation, automated summaries, intelligent routing, and prioritization, with expanding capabilities for agentic collaboration.
In addition to using generative AI capabilities on AWS, Applaud uses AWS services for visibility and security. Applaud implemented Amazon CloudWatch to observe and monitor resources and AWS WAF, which protects web applications from common exploits, to safeguard sensitive employee data.
Outcome | Accelerating innovation with enterprise-grade capabilities
By rebuilding its platform on AWS, Applaud transformed its engineering capabilities and innovation velocity. The company can prototype and iterate rapidly, with development cycles dramatically shortened. “Using generative AI on AWS has transformed our engineering productivity,” says Casemore. “We’re innovating faster than ever, with ideas moving from concept to prototype to production in a fraction of the time it used to take.”
Technical performance improvements include streaming response times improving from 3–5 seconds to 1–2 seconds, and text generation throughput improving by roughly 2–3 times. “We’ve seen optimization benefits through faster responses, simplified operations, and reduced maintenance overhead,” says Casemore. “The improved efficiency drives significant margin impact for our business.”
The company has gained the enterprise-grade flexibility and scalability needed to support complex global operations while maintaining strict data privacy and residency requirements. “For us, the big win is speed to market and being able to deliver that scalability using AWS,” says Casemore.