New-hire onboarding is a checklist. Send a welcome email on day one. Send the benefits-enrollment form. Get the signed I-9 back. Get the direct-deposit form back. Once both forms are in, put orientation on the calendar. That's it — a sequence of emails, a couple of attachments coming back the other way, and one calendar invite at the end.
Most "AI for HR" demos point a model at someone's personal Outlook and call it onboarding. That's fine until you want the agent to be the sender — to own a hr@yourcompany.com mailbox, send from it, watch for replies, pull the signed forms out of those replies, and book orientation under its own name. A model hovering over a human's inbox can't do that cleanly. It needs an identity.
That identity is an Agent Account: a real Nylas mailbox with a grant_id that works against every grant-scoped endpoint — Messages, Attachments, Calendars, Events. Inbound mail surfaces through webhooks, which are application-scoped: you subscribe once at the app level and filter events by the grant_id each payload carries. The whole point of this post is that you already know the data plane. An Agent Account is just a grant. Every call below is a call you'd make against any connected mailbox. There's nothing new to learn except "the sender is software."
