What is an AI employee?
An AI employee is a user-configured AI agent that operates inside a company's own tools and workspace: it reads context, proposes actions, and executes only what a human approves, with every action logged and reversible ones undoable. Unlike a chatbot, it holds a role, a scope of tools, and a standing set of responsibilities.
Not a chatbot, and not a script
A chatbot answers what you ask it. A traditional automation script runs the same fixed steps every time, with no judgment in between. An AI employee sits between the two: it holds a standing role (inbox triage, meeting follow-up, invoice chasing), reasons over the current state of the tools it is scoped to, and decides what to propose next, inside boundaries a human set when they hired it.
How the role stays accountable
An AI employee’s authority is never open-ended. Its permissions are scoped to specific tools and actions at the runtime boundary, and it cannot expand its own permissions. Every action it wants to take, sending an email, updating a record, posting a message, is a Proposal: it lands in a queue with full context before anything executes. Once approved and executed, the action is written to an audit log, and where the action is reversible, it can be undone from there, one action at a time.
Where it lives
An AI employee is not a standalone app; it is built inside a company’s own workspace, on the same pages and databases a person edits by hand, and connected to the company’s real tools through native connectors. That placement is what separates it from a general-purpose AI assistant: it has a fixed home, a fixed scope, and a paper trail.