The hard part was teaching it when not to answer

It's half past four on a Friday. An employee has reported bullying by their immediate manager. The same employee has underperformed for six months, and you have the documentation in order.

Can you let them go?

There are two kinds of answer to that. One of them is fast.

Ask a general AI assistant and you'll probably get a confident yes with three caveats. It sounds sensible. It's also the answer that can cost you the most.

Because the right answer is neither yes nor no. Section 2 A-4 of the Norwegian Working Environment Act prohibits retaliation against someone who has raised a concern, and its fourth subsection reverses the burden of proof: if the employee presents information giving reason to believe the dismissal was retaliation, you have to show that it wasn't.

And then the one thing that actually helps you there and then: talk to a lawyer before you do anything.

That answer is what you get at hr-kompis.no. The screenshot above is real — that's the product answering, not an illustration.

When we started building, we assumed the hard part would be getting it to answer correctly. It wasn't. The hard part was deciding when it should refuse.

An AI that always answers is worth nothing in work governed by law. It always has something for you, and you never find out which of its answers you can trust. That is worse than not having the tool, because now you have confidence you haven't earned.

So HR-Kompis has two rules it isn't allowed to break.

The first is that every claim carries a statutory reference. Not "the law says", not "common practice". The section is there in the answer, and you can click through to Lovdata and read it yourself. If there's no source, the claim doesn't go in.

The second is that when a case is too big, it says so. The answer gets a marker — ⚠ Trenger advokat — and a sentence on why this particular case lands there. Not as small print at the bottom, but at the top, before you've started reading.

That second rule isn't a technical decision. It comes from more than twenty years of leadership in the car industry, the last six as managing director.

I've sat in those conversations myself. The sick leave that drags on. The dismissal you're completely certain about, right up until someone asks one question you hadn't thought of. The whistleblowing report that arrives at the worst possible moment.

The hard part is rarely finding the rule. The hard part is knowing when you're outside what you can decide on your own. That instinct is what we've tried to build in.

We took it one step further. On our own front page it says that if you're a member of NHO or Virke, you already have free access to a lawyer for the heavy cases.

That's poor sales technique. It's also true, and a tool meant to keep you on the right side of the law can't afford to open with half of one.

HR-Kompis doesn't replace your lawyer. It's the fast answer when the phone queue is closed and you have to act now.

Then there are the templates, and they deserve more than one line.

There are 25 of them, across the same five areas. Written warning. Sick-leave follow-up plan. Employment reference. Holiday pay calculation. Data processing agreement. Risk assessment. You open one, fill in the fields, and download it as Word or PDF.

Sensitive fields are marked with a padlock, and they are substituted in your browser. We don't store them, and they are never passed on to the language model. Close the panel without copying and they're gone. That's the only privacy promise that holds all the way: not having the information.

The templates don't pretend to be finished either. Every draft carries "UTKAST — IKKE SIGNERT" at the top, and the guidance that comes with it states whether it can stay in your internal control documentation or has to be deleted before the document goes out.

Rates and amounts are never written into the template itself. They're pulled from where they actually live, so a document from last year can't lie to you this year. The employment-law templates have been through a lawyer.

There's one more thing we've done that makes the product slightly more awkward to use, and that we won't be changing.

Two-factor is mandatory. Not optional, not something you can switch off in settings. The first time you sign in at hr-kompis.no, you're asked to set up an authenticator app, and from then on you enter a one-time code when you log in.

The reason is short. Behind that login sit sick leave, pay, warnings and personnel cases with names attached. You sign in with a link we send by email — and a link like that is one factor. The factor is your inbox.

If someone gets into your email, they are thereby also inside your personnel cases. That's too short a path. The one-time code lives on your phone, not in an inbox.

We know an extra step costs us people who give up partway through signing up. It's a trade we make with our eyes open. A tool handling information about people's illness and dismissals cannot be protected by an email account alone.

HR-Kompis has been sitting at hr-kompis.no for a while without us saying much about it. We wanted to watch it run first — that the answers hold when the questions arrive badly phrased, that the templates survive being sent to an actual employee, that all the dull machinery around it behaves.

From today we're saying it out loud.

Five areas: employment law, pay, health and safety, GDPR and internal control. You ask in your own words — "Per has been off sick for eight weeks, what do I have to do now?" is enough.

Fourteen days free, no card details, at hr-kompis.no.

If you take one thing from this, make it this one:

Next time someone shows you an AI tool for an area governed by law, ask what it does when it doesn't know. If you don't get a concrete answer to that, you know enough.