SeaLink is an Auckland ferry operator, providing essential vehicle, passenger, and freight services across the Hauraki Gulf. They specialise in connecting the mainland to Waiheke and Great Barrier Island. Their vision is to create a more connected and sustainable world through safe, reliable, and exceptional customer experiences.
To continue their commitment to operational excellence and employee satisfaction, SeaLink wanted to modernise how they managed complex payroll allowances. With 137+ employees governed by varying union and non-union conditions, verifying timesheets and allowances was an intricate and highly manual process. Ferry operations include complexities such as what staff have liquor licences, what vessels each employee is approved to work on, meal allowances and minimum gaps between shifts depending on what their home port is. To support their administrative staff, SeaLink envisioned an objective, automated solution to safeguard payroll accuracy and empower their finance team. They needed a reliable system that could navigate these complex rules while creating a smoother, more efficient administrative workflow.
ClearPoint partnered with SeaLink to deliver CORAL (Compliance & Operations Review for Attendance & Labour). Recognising the importance of a strong technical foundation, ClearPoint guided SeaLink to leverage their existing maturing data platform. This enabled the creation of an AI solution on top of a clean, governed data foundation using Snowflake and Informatica.
The solution focused on building a business-centric AI agent positioned as a supported “digital teammate” rather than a human replacement. To ensure a cost-effective and scalable architecture, the solution integrated SeaLink’s trusted data tools with n8n for orchestration, reserving GPT-3.5 mini purely for analytical reasoning.
By embedding specific contract rules directly into the AI's system message, CORAL operates in a passive analysis mode. It flags anomalies for human review with report-backed justifications, giving the payroll team the objective insights they need to make informed decisions without automatically overriding human input.
The CORAL project provided SeaLink with immediate, tangible evidence of value. During the initial run, the system successfully reviewed 279 allowances in a single pass. It verified 88.5% of these as compliant automatically and isolated the remaining 11.5% for closer inspection. Catching these discrepancies early prevents financial risk and eliminates the heavy administrative burden of retrospective corrections. Beyond payroll, CORAL quickly elevated itself into a broader operational asset by proactively identifying upcoming compliance requirements—such as certification renewals—ensuring SeaLink can maintain continuous, safe, and compliant operations. By providing objective justifications for timesheet corrections, the platform also reduced friction between shift managers and payroll, driving significant internal efficiencies. SeaLink’s team was so empowered by this new capability that they expanded the system's scope to cover additional employee groups, demonstrating true ownership of the platform.
"CORAL serves as an essential guardrail for our finance team, helping us consistently meet our commitments to our workforce while significantly reducing administrative effort."
Kieran Bainbridge, SeaLink IT Manager