How F-Secure built a governed front door for every Fellow

F-Secure is a Finnish cybersecurity company, founded in 1988, headquartered in Helsinki and listed on Nasdaq Helsinki. It employs around 1,790 people worldwide, known internally not as employees but as Fellows.

That internal language is a small signal of a larger truth. F-Secure thinks carefully about how it treats its people, and just as carefully about how it treats data. Compliance and data access are not afterthoughts here. They shape how any new system, Harriet included, is allowed to be introduced at all.

The goal will be familiar to most People teams: give Fellows a way to self-serve, get personalised answers, and stop waiting in a queue for routine information. Two things made the brief distinct, and a third made it genuinely difficult.

Meet Fellows where they already are

Fellows needed to be met exactly where they already worked, with no disruption to how they communicated day to day. That meant launching inside Microsoft Teams, F-Secure's communications platform at the time. When the organisation later migrated its collaboration tooling to Slack, Harriet moved with them rather than asking Fellows to adjust to a new interface on top of everything else that was changing.

Behind that consistent front end, Harriet draws on F-Secure's own knowledge sources to answer questions specific to each Fellow's role, location and policies, and does it in the Fellow's own language, which matters for a genuinely international workforce.

Triage into their own systems, not a parallel one

F-Secure was not starting from a blank slate. Unlike organisations building a ticketing and knowledge function from scratch, it already ran a mature ticketing system across People Operations and IT. The ask was not to replace it. It was to make it smarter.

So Harriet was built to work inside the system F-Secure already had. When a request cannot be resolved through self-serve, Harriet triages it directly into that existing ticketing system and routes it to the correct team, People Operations or IT, with the context already attached. Fellows raise a request the same way they always have. What changed is how quickly, and how accurately, it reaches the right person.

A Workday integration built slowly on purpose

Underneath both of those sat the harder technical problem. F-Secure runs its HR data on Workday, whose data model is considerably more intricate than most of the platforms Harriet connects to, and F-Secure's compliance posture meant that intricacy could not be shortcut. Every field Harriet could see, every action a Fellow could trigger and every level of manager access had to be deliberately scoped and tested, which is what scoping an agent's tool access looks like when compliance leads the design. This integration demanded significantly more time, attention and structured rollout than a typical HRIS connection.

It was built first in a controlled demo environment and scoped narrowly before it scoped wider. In the initial phase, Fellows could view their own information, check leave balances and book leave, all personalised, all governed. Manager-level access was enabled only once that foundation had been tested and trusted. The pace was intentional. For a company this careful about data access, the right sequencing mattered more than speed.

That discipline paid off in adoption. The rollout followed a structured runway: a communications plan agreed in October 2025, training materials finalised, a final testing session completed, then a company-wide launch on 25 November 2025 followed by weekly check-ins to catch issues early and keep trust building.

Where this is heading

As the initial rollout proved itself, F-Secure and Harriet shaped a shared view of what comes next. Harriet starts by giving Fellows a simple self-serve experience for questions and routine tasks. Over time it becomes a cross-functional orchestration layer: a single front door for requests across HR, IT, Finance, Legal and Procurement, where answers, approvals and support requests are traceable, auditable and resolved in one place.

The work runs in the same order the rollout did, one proven step at a time. A pre-onboarding workflow that cuts the manual effort and duplicate data entry currently falling to both HR and IT. Automated data input for document templates across the employee lifecycle, starting with the ones Fellows request most, such as employment verification letters. Expanding Harriet's remit beyond HR and IT into Finance, Legal and Procurement, so fewer requests need to change hands to reach the person who can close them. Direct expense claim filing from inside Harriet into Workday, and stronger single sign-on and identity integration across every system Harriet touches, which tightens the compliance posture further rather than trading it away for convenience.

Further out, the shape is a cross-functional wheel, close to how Harriet describes governed AI team by team. People Operations keeps dedicated support such as personalised knowledge access, leave booking, letter generation and conversation analytics. People Operations and IT jointly own lifecycle events like onboarding, offboarding, promotions and relocations, with data integrity maintained automatically across systems. People Operations, IT, Finance and Legal converge on the genuinely cross-functional work: contract and NDA reviews, claims management, a single front door for procurement requests and vendor onboarding.

What the rollout showed

F-Secure's rollout is a demonstration of what it looks like to introduce AI-driven self-serve support at an organisation that treats compliance and data governance as first principles rather than obstacles. By meeting Fellows in the channel they already used, triaging into the ticketing system they already ran, and taking the time Workday's complexity demanded rather than cutting corners, Harriet earned the trust needed to expand.

What started as a self-serve support tool is now on a clear path to becoming F-Secure's single front door across HR, IT, Finance, Legal and Procurement. One governed, auditable system standing behind a simple, consistent experience for every Fellow.