Service
Digital FTEs (AI Employees)
An AI worker scoped like a job description rather than a product: one defined role, owned end to end, with an explicit handoff path to a person.
Who this is for
- Roles that are mostly one repeatable workflow at high volume
- Work that needs covering outside a single shift
- Teams where hiring for a narrow role is hard to justify but the work is real
The problem
FTE — Full-Time Equivalent — is an HR term for one full-time worker's worth of output. A Digital FTE borrows the framing deliberately: instead of pitching AI as a feature bolted onto existing software, it is scoped like a role, with responsibilities written the way a job description is written.
That changes what it gets compared against. Software is judged against other software — price per seat, feature count. A role is judged against a hire: what would this cost as a person, how long until they are productive, and how consistent is the output once they are.
Where the comparison holds
Availability is the clearest difference and it is structural rather than a performance claim: a role covers roughly forty hours a week before overtime becomes a conversation, and a Digital FTE runs the same on a Sunday at 3am.
Ramp-up is the second. Hiring, onboarding, and reaching full productivity on a defined workflow routinely takes three to six months. A scoped Digital FTE build is typically 2–4 weeks, because the training is a build process rather than a person learning on the job.
Consistency is the third and the most double-edged. A tired employee on their fortieth call is a different employee than on their fifth. A Digital FTE handles call five hundred the way it handled call one — which is an advantage only if the role was scoped correctly in the first place.
Where it does not
A Digital FTE is a specialist for one workflow, not a general employee. Ask it to cover too much and you get the AI equivalent of a bad hire: present, and unreliable in exactly the moments that matter.
It also does not remove the need for human judgement on anything genuinely ambiguous or sensitive. Every build has an explicit handoff path to a person for that reason. The goal is to absorb the repeatable majority of a role, not to pretend the rest does not need someone.
What you get
- A written scope for the role, agreed before anything is built
- The Digital FTE built, integrated, and tested against real scenarios
- Defined handoff rules and escalation paths
- Documentation and ongoing iteration if you want it
A full Digital FTE build is usually 2–4 weeks depending on scope.
When this is the wrong fit
Worth saying plainly rather than finding out after a build starts.
- The role genuinely needs broad judgement across unpredictable situations
- The workflow is not defined well enough to write down yet
Think this fits what you're trying to do? Let's talk it through.
Book a Discovery Call