Improvements to the People Plugin in the AI Assistant!
We are excited to share upcoming improvements on the People Plugin in the AI Assistant that will help users find people and groups more easily!
These changes will be available in the week of September 28.
| Improvement | What’s improving | Example | Why it matters |
| Find people by initials | Look someone up with an initial instead of a full first name | "j doe" or "J. Doe" → John Doe | More precise name lookups. Results are more relevant, not just more numerous. |
| Find groups by their everyday name | Reach distribution lists and security groups without typing the exact system name | "IT helpdesk" → IT-Helpdesk_Team, ITHelpdeskTeam | Less "what is this group actually called?" Group names in most directories use underscores, dots, or run-together capitals. |
| Understand role, department, and location | Search people by what they do or where they are, using natural wording | "SWE" → Software Engineer; "California" → employees in Mountain View | Leverage more fields - Same data, better performance |
Finding people by initials
Employees frequently search the way they speak — "j doe," "J. Doe" — especially for colleagues they know informally. Previously, name search required a recognizable first name. Now a single initial is enough to identify the right person, and the underlying match is stricter, so the results that come back are more relevant.
Finding groups by their everyday name
Distribution lists and access groups are usually named for systems, not humans: IT-Helpdesk_Team, orchestration_team, EMEA-SDR-Team, EntSearch LP Team. Employees search for "IT helpdesk" or "EMEA SDR team." Moveworks now recognizes the everyday phrasing of a group name, including names joined by underscores, periods, hyphens, or run-together capitalization.
Validated examples from a live environment:
| Employee searches for | Moveworks finds |
|---|---|
| orchestration team | orchestration_team |
| ent search lp team | EntSearch LP Team |
| emea sdr team | EMEA-SDR-Team |
This also means a newly created group becomes findable immediately rather than after the next scheduled refresh.
Understanding role, department, and location
Job titles, departments, and locations are free text in most HR systems, and employees rarely search for them verbatim. Moveworks now interprets these fields as recognized concepts rather than as literal strings, which adds two things a text match cannot do:
- Synonyms and abbreviations. "SWE," "Software Eng," and "Software Engineer" are treated as the same role. "ML" matches machine learning.
- Geographic hierarchy. An employee whose location is "Mountain View" is correctly returned for a search for "California" or "USA."
This works out of the box using Moveworks' built-in understanding of roles, teams, and locations, and improves further for customers who maintain their own role, department, or location catalogs.
What you need to do
No action is required.
Specifically:
- No configuration or setup changes.
- No re-indexing, migration, or downtime.
- No new data collected and no change to your connectors, data sources, or refresh schedules.
- No change to permissions. Search results continue to respect existing access controls exactly as they do today.
These changes will be available in the week of September 28.
Moveworks Search Product Team