I get asked this more than almost any other architecture question right now. How do you give an AI assistant access to HR data without creating a security and compliance disaster? Here is the architecture I have landed on after working through it on several deployments.
The short version: you do not give the AI access to HR data directly. You give specific AI agents access to specific HR data subsets, under specific access policies, with full audit logging. These are four separate design decisions and most teams collapse them into one.
The threat model first
Before designing anything, you need to be clear about what you are protecting against.
The external threat is straightforward: you do not want HR data accessible to anyone outside the authorized user set, which means your inference infrastructure cannot call out to external APIs with HR context in the payload.
