The Mobility Fix That Cost HelloFresh Nothing

Send an employee to work in another country and you bury them in tax codes, visa rules and legal fine print they have little hope of navigating alone. Guiding them through it is what a company's global mobility team is for.

At HelloFresh, that team built its own AI tools to explain things. They replaced unread intranet guides with infographics that mapped each step, swapped self-assessment forms for common questions and eventually created small apps "vibe-coded" with AI and connected to live data.

The whole thing, says Michali Henig, head of global mobility at HelloFresh, cost "zero" beyond the hours her team already put in. 

Start with the problem, not the tool

This is the trap Michali and Mercer's Michael Nash, Commercial Leader for Career Europe, flag in the article they co-wrote. Teams, Michael warns, reach for a shiny tool before naming the problem it should solve.

HelloFresh did the reverse, starting with the friction employees actually felt, the repeated questions, the slow answers, then building the simplest fix for it.

The tools earned trust fast because they solved something real, and freed the team for the judgement calls no machine can make.

Mobility work runs on immigration, tax and legal deadlines, where speed helps but accuracy decides. Michali has no illusions about AI here.

"AI is lazy and is searching for the simplest answer," she says.

Michali's team uses enterprise-grade tools inside a clear policy, never free public apps, for anything touching company data, since the alternative invites leaks and fraud. Good governance, she argues, does not slow progress but makes it possible.

Adoption, by contrast, comes from doing. "The best teacher for AI is AI," she says, and leaders who hand their teams proper tools and the room to experiment get further than those who run another training deck.

Keep humans where the risk is real

Michali grades an AI project by what it frees up. Less firefighting, less risk, a better employee experience and more time for the work that actually needs a human.

For mobility leaders who want to copy the model, the steps are plain.

• Start with one recurring pain point, not a tool.
• Build a simple, low-cost fix fast, then improve it.
• Redesign the workflow, do not just digitise the old one.
• Use enterprise AI for work data, never free public apps.
• Keep human review on every legal, tax or immigration outcome.
• Track time saved, escalations cut and employee satisfaction.

None of this replaces the judgement and care a mobility professional brings during a stressful relocation.

It clears the repetitive work so they can focus on the person. The mindset Michali recommends is simple enough to put on a wall. The goal, she says, is to "thrive and not to fear".