# Digital employee

A Digital Business Employee is software defined by a **job** rather than by a feature: it owns a queue of incoming work, decides what each item needs, does as much as its permissions allow, and hands back what it may not do — carrying memory of the business between items. Connect is one. A tool you invoke and wait on is not.

- **Status:** Available
- **Audience:** both
- **In the app:** #/home, #/needs-you
- **Last verified:** 2026-09-10
- **Canonical:** https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/glossary/digital-employee/

## The definition, and the part that carries the weight

Three properties together make the category, and dropping any one of them produces something familiar and different.

1. **It owns work rather than answering calls.** Nobody hands it a task. Mail arrives, a call comes in, a follow-up falls due, and it picks the work up because the work is its job.
2. **It persists between items.** What it learnt on Tuesday's thread is available on Friday's call, because it lives in the workspace's [Memory](/docs/glossary/memory/) rather than in a session.
3. **It has bounded authority.** There is an explicit statement of what it may do alone and what it must ask about, and the boundary is enforced in code rather than in a prompt.

The third property is the one that turns a demo into an employee. Software with no stated authority is either trusted with everything, which nobody does with a business's outgoing mail, or trusted with nothing, which makes it a drafting tool. [Autonomy](/docs/glossary/autonomy/) is where Connect writes that boundary down.

## How Connect fills the role

| What an employee does | Where it happens |
|---|---|
| Picks up what arrived | Mail and message fetch into the canonical thread and message records |
| Works out what it is | Triage and classification in the agent loop |
| Checks what is known | [Knowledge](/docs/glossary/knowledge/), [Memory](/docs/glossary/memory/) and [Rules](/docs/glossary/rule/) resolved for that piece of work |
| Acts, or asks | [Autonomy](/docs/glossary/autonomy/) decides; a held action becomes an [Approval](/docs/glossary/approval/) |
| Escalates a judgement | [Needs You](/docs/glossary/needs-you/), ranked rather than chronological |
| Keeps its promises | [Follow-ups](/docs/follow-ups/) on a channel, with a reason and a date |
| Leaves a record | The [Audit](/docs/glossary/audit/) trail, including refusals |

The last row is easy to skim past and is part of the definition. A refusal is a decision, and an employee who declined to do something and never said so would be worse than one who did it. Connect records the refusal with the rule that produced it.

## Not the same as a task agent, a copilot, or an automation

The neighbouring categories are close enough that vendors use the words interchangeably, and the difference decides what you have to do each morning.

| Category | Who starts the work | What survives between runs | What it does when unsure |
|---|---|---|---|
| Digital business employee | The work itself — mail, a call, a due follow-up | Memory, relationships, commitments | Asks a person and keeps the item visible |
| Task agent | You, with a task | Usually nothing | Finishes anyway, or fails the run |
| Copilot | You, inside a document or an inbox | Your session | Suggests, and you decide in place |
| Automation or workflow | A trigger you configured | Nothing beyond the run's state | Follows the branch you wrote, or errors |

The consequence is practical. With a task agent, the queue lives in a person's head: nothing happens to an unanswered enquiry until somebody thinks of it. With an employee, the unanswered enquiry is the thing that is late, and the product's job is to make that visible. That is why Needs You is ranked by what is at stake rather than sorted by arrival time, and why an item drains by itself when its cause clears rather than waiting to be ticked off.

> **Careful** The category name is not a claim about staffing levels, headcount or replacement. It describes how the software is shaped — a queue, memory and bounded authority — and nothing in this manual quantifies work it saves.

## Questions

### Does calling it an employee mean it acts without permission?

The opposite. The category requires a written boundary; in Connect that boundary is per channel and resolves at four scopes, so a workspace can let Connect answer WhatsApp on its own while every email waits for a human yes.

### Is the Connect Assistant the digital employee?

No. The Assistant is how you talk to Connect — a tool-using chat surface inside the app. The employee is the loop that works the queue whether or not anyone has the Assistant open, and the two share the same records and the same limits.

### What happens to the queue overnight?

Work continues within the permissions set for each channel, and anything needing a decision accumulates in Needs You for the morning. A dated commitment that has gone too stale to keep is closed as missed rather than acted on late — a very late call-back is worse than none.

## Related

- [Connect](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/glossary/connect/)
- [Autonomy](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/glossary/autonomy/)
- [Needs You](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/glossary/needs-you/)
- [Connect by JBRH](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/product/)
- [Separating the agent's authority from the person's](https://connectbyjbrh.com/research/authority-separation/)

## What this page is based on

- `docs-source/facts.py` — CANONICAL_TERMS, Digital Business Employee
- docs-source/sources/GENERAL.md §5 — autonomy, approvals and Needs You
- docs-source/sources/GENERAL.md §7 — follow-ups and the late-call rule