Both — and that distinction matters. Organisations purchase besideU, and in doing so they give every manager, HR team, and employee access to structured bereavement support from day one.
For HR and managers, besideU provides the framework, guidance, and visibility to respond consistently and confidently. For employees, it means the organisation is ready before they even need to ask — so they're met with a clear, supported process rather than silence and uncertainty.
No. besideU works alongside your existing policy — it doesn't overwrite it. Maeve is trained on your specific policy documentation, so every interaction is grounded in what your organisation has already agreed.
If your current policy has gaps or is out of date, we can identify that as part of onboarding. The platform is designed to make your policy more useful in the moment — not replace it.
All of them. Grief happens in every organisation — regardless of size, sector, or structure. besideU is built to flex around the needs of each client, so whether you have 50 employees or 50,000, the platform is configured to the way your organisation works.
Because the moment it's needed is the worst possible time to prepare. When a bereavement occurs, a manager has minutes — not hours — to respond to an employee who is in shock. There's no time to read a policy document, brief HR, or draft a message from scratch.
Organisations with besideU in place respond consistently, confidently, and with care. Those without it fall back on individual instinct — and the variation in how employees are treated becomes an HR and retention problem in itself.
EAPs are valuable — but they're designed for a different problem. An EAP provides reactive, confidential support once an employee decides to reach out. besideU sits at the organisational layer, before that point.
The gap typically looks like this:
besideU integrates with your existing EAP — Maeve signposts employees to it at the right moment. The two work together, not in competition.
Broad mental health platforms are built for everyday wellbeing — stress, sleep, resilience. They're not designed for the specific, time-sensitive demands of bereavement, which requires immediate guidance for managers, process coordination for HR, and a structured pathway for the employee through leave, check-ins, and return to work.
besideU is purpose-built for that situation. It doesn't replace your general wellbeing provision — it fills a specific gap those platforms don't address.
besideU includes a free resource directory for clients without EAP provision, signposting employees to reputable bereavement support organisations including Cruse Bereavement Support, Child Bereavement UK, and the Samaritans.
If an employee needs clinical support and no contracted EAP is in place, there is always a clear, safe pathway available through the platform.
Maeve operates differently depending on who she's supporting. For managers, she provides real-time guidance on what to say and do — drafting first messages, preparing check-in prompts, advising on return-to-work conversations — all grounded in your organisation's bereavement policy. For HR, she surfaces case progress, flags overdue actions, and provides an audit trail. For employees, she provides a private space to ask questions, understand their entitlements, and be signposted to further support.
In every mode, Maeve is advisory. She supports human judgement — she never replaces it.
We take this seriously — and we've built the architecture to match. Maeve is not designed to be the decision-maker. She is a structured support layer built around clinical governance, not a free-form chatbot.
Here is specifically how the risk is managed:
No — and this is an explicit constraint built into the system. Maeve is prohibited from diagnosing any mental health condition, clinically assessing suicide risk, providing medical advice, providing legal advice, or acting as an emergency service.
When an interaction touches one of those areas, Maeve redirects — to the organisation's EAP, to qualified professionals, or in an emergency, directly to crisis services. She is built to know the boundary and to route clearly when it is reached.
besideU requires sign-off from a clinical and legal advisory board before any version of Maeve is deployed. The board includes a BACP-qualified grief counsellor, a mental health professional, a doctor, and digital health legal counsel. Every material change to Maeve's outputs requires re-approval by the relevant adviser before going live. Annual full reviews are mandatory, and any red flag event triggers an immediate review.
No. Employee companion conversations are completely private. HR sees case management data — check-in completions, case status, return-to-work milestones — not the content of personal conversations with Maeve.
This is enforced at the system level. HR mode and employee mode run as separate instances with separate context pipelines. There is no mechanism — administrative or otherwise — to access companion conversation content.
The only exception is a genuine safety emergency. If Maeve's red flag escalation is triggered, the HR safety contact receives a notification containing only the employee's name and a timestamp — not the content of the conversation.
Yes. besideU is built and operated in compliance with UK GDPR. A full Data Processing Agreement is provided to every client organisation on sign-up. We have completed a Data Protection Impact Assessment covering the AI companion and its handling of special category data.
Every employee is clearly informed they are speaking to an AI before their first Maeve interaction. This disclosure is a legal requirement and it's embedded in the product — not buried in terms and conditions.
No. Employee data is never used to train external AI models. Conversation content from the employee companion is session-only at launch — nothing is stored beyond the active session. The only data retained is metadata (timestamps, classification events) used for safety governance and audit purposes.
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