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How Brazil's Largest HRTech Built an AI Assistant That Speaks Their Culture

Lucas Ribeiro
Lucas Ribeiro
March 13, 2026
How Brazil's Largest HRTech Built an AI Assistant That Speaks Their Culture

Gupy is Brazil's largest HRTech. Through organic growth and acquisitions, the company expanded from a recruiting platform into a full ecosystem spanning hiring, onboarding, training, performance, and career development. Today, around 700 employees (they call themselves Guppers) work across the country. And with that growth came an internal challenge: making all of that institutional knowledge accessible to every employee, at the moment they needed it.


The knowledge problem nobody solved

Gupy went from 120 to 700 employees in what felt like a blink, largely through acquisitions that brought new people, processes, and institutional knowledge. But knowledge management never kept pace. The company used Google Sites for their internal knowledge base: functional, but rigid and hard to make intuitive.

Gupy never did knowledge management well. We were never that mega-organized company that had everything mapped out. We grew very fast, mainly because of the companies we acquired.

— Duda Lima, Internal Communications & Culture, Gupy

But the real bottleneck wasn't the site. It was Slack. To centralize employee questions, the People team created a channel called "Gente Escuta" ("People Listen"). In practice, nearly 40 people had to keep one eye on that channel at all times. Questions ranged from vacation policies to performance reviews to onboarding processes. Each required a different specialist. No single person could answer everything. And because the channel was public, some Guppers were too embarrassed to ask questions they feared might seem basic.

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Before: The "Gente Escuta" reality

  • Entire People team (~40 people) monitoring one Slack channel
  • Knowledge lived in people's heads, not in systems
  • Employees embarrassed to ask "obvious" questions publicly
  • Answers varied in quality and tone depending on who was available
  • Information existed in Google Sites but people couldn't find it
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After: Guta in Slack

  • Guppers ask questions in private 1:1 conversations with Guta
  • Guta pulls from the full knowledge base and answers instantly
  • Consistent tone of voice aligned with Gupy's culture
  • Knowledge base updates flow to the agent automatically
  • People team focuses on strategic work instead of repetitive questions

My Slack was completely overloaded with questions I couldn't even answer. People assumed I held all the knowledge. We wanted to depersonalize this. Guta is the source of knowledge, not Duda.

— Duda Lima

Meet Guta

Guta isn't new. She's a character that Gupy's People team created long before any AI was involved: the face of internal communications, with a name, appearance, and personality chosen by the Guppers themselves. Before the project, Guta was a Slack profile that Duda manually operated behind the scenes. It worked at small scale, but it was one person doing the work of what should be a system.

The vision was to make Guta real. An always-on AI assistant that lives in Slack, understands every internal policy and cultural reference, and responds in Guta's established voice. Not a generic chatbot. A virtual team member that Guppers already knew and trusted, now actually capable of answering their questions.

Guta introduces herself to a Gupper and explains what she can help with.

Two projects, one system

Bringing Guta to life required solving two problems at once. The knowledge base needed to be modernized so it could serve as a reliable source. And the AI assistant needed to be built to pull from that source and deliver answers in Slack. The two are deeply connected: Guta is only as good as the knowledge she can access.

The knowledge hub

The first step was migrating Gupy's knowledge base from Google Sites to deco CMS. A developer on the deco team built the initial site structure and custom sections tailored to Gupy's needs: pages organized by employee journey stages, SSO login restricted to Gupy emails, and reusable components designed so the People team could create new pages and update content on their own.

On Google Sites we were locked into their format. Here, the sky was the limit. We could lay out knowledge, policies, and processes in a much more elegant, fun, and appealing way. People actually want to consume the content now.

— Duda Lima

After the initial build, the People team took over day-to-day operations. For content updates and smaller adjustments, they use DecoPilot, deco's AI-powered editing agent that lets anyone make changes through natural language. Duda now describes herself as "close to a specialist" and regularly adjusts content and sections on her own without involving the engineering team.

In the beginning, I depended a lot on Daniel. He'd say, 'Talk to DecoPilot.' Now me and the assistant are best friends. I can resolve half my issues without involving the team at all.

— Duda Lima
Gupy's knowledge hub in the deco CMS admin panel
The knowledge hub inside deco CMS's admin, where the People team manages content and sections autonomously.

The AI agent

Guta's agent, prompt, and workflows all live inside deco CMS alongside the knowledge hub. The architecture connects three systems: a vector database stores the hub's content and stays in sync through scheduled deco workflows that detect page changes and update automatically; the company's shared drive provides supplementary documents like policy PDFs and guides; and a custom open-source Slack integration delivers the experience, allowing Guppers to message Guta in private conversations, just like messaging a colleague.

When a Gupper asks a question, the agent searches the knowledge base, retrieves supplementary context if needed, and composes a response with links to source pages and related topics. If someone asks about their performance review, Guta might also surface information about professional development plans, because those topics are naturally connected. Responses stream in real time, so users see the answer forming rather than waiting in silence.

How it all fits together

1

People team updates content

The People team edits pages on the knowledge hub through deco CMS, or uses DecoPilot for quick adjustments. They can also refine Guta's prompt and behavior directly in the same platform.
2

Workflows sync changes automatically

Scheduled workflows in deco CMS detect page changes, extract the updated content, and sync it to a vector database. No manual step required.
3

Gupper asks Guta a question on Slack

A Gupper messages Guta in a private Slack conversation, just like messaging a colleague.
4

Guta retrieves and responds

The agent searches the vector database and Google Drive for relevant content, then responds in Guta's voice with links to source pages. Responses stream in real time.

Culture is the key

Guta needed to speak the way Guppers speak: approachable, aware of internal vocabulary, comfortable with memes and wordplay. What made this possible is how simple it is for the People team to update both sides of the system. They edit content on the knowledge hub through deco CMS, and they refine Guta's prompt and personality in the same platform. Early responses were too dry. The team iterated on the prompt, tested exhaustively, and gradually shaped Guta into something richer. No engineering tickets required.

Culture is the big key. You can see an amazing project at Amazon and want to replicate it, but Amazon's culture is completely different from ours. Guta works because she internalized our culture. The Guppers chose her name, her face, her tone of voice. They're all parents of Guta.

— Duda Lima

Early results

Guta's answers have gotten richer through iterative refinement. The team has learned unexpected skills managing prompts and knowledge retrieval, and the volume of direct messages to the People team has dropped noticeably. Employees are actively engaging with both the bot and the knowledge hub, and some have even created Guta-themed artwork using internal AI tools.

For the People team, the shift is tangible: Guta went from a weekly communications messenger to an always-available knowledge partner. The team that used to spend its time answering repetitive questions now focuses on strategic work.


What's ahead

The plan is to expand Guta's coverage into new knowledge domains and deeper integration with internal systems. The team has already identified other use cases across the employee experience where the same approach can create value. For a company that manages the entire employee lifecycle as its core product, the way they manage their own employees' experience matters. Guta is the first step in treating internal knowledge with the same care Gupy brings to their customers' HR processes.

If it's up to me, we have many more projects together. We saw how much the platform can help us go beyond what we've been doing. I have so many ideas to explore.

— Duda Lima

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