Software assigned a bounded job inside your operation: the front desk, the follow-up, the work between systems. The agent gets the job. A person keeps the responsibility, and that person is who defines the job and makes the agent fit to do it. Hire one without the other and you have a login.
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An AI employee is software assigned bounded work, with a named human owner.
The work is the kind you keep meaning to hire for. The inbox that gets answered at nine the next morning. The second follow-up nobody sends. The copying between systems that someone does all day without ever having been hired to do it. An agent can hold work like that: it reads your systems, uses your tools, carries the task from asked to done, and writes down what it did.
Bounded is the word that matters. “Handle our operations” is not a job description, and neither is a person’s whole job. A seat is the part of one that can be written down: what comes in, what goes out, what done looks like, and what a wrong answer costs. Somebody has to write that down before an agent can hold it, and that is where the human comes in.
The human does more than approve the output. They make the job executable.
A business need arrives as a sentence: the quotes are slow, the leads go cold, nobody reads the filings. Turning that into a job an agent can perform is work, and it is the work. Somebody has to decide what the seat is for, which systems it may touch, what it may do alone, what it brings to a person, what done means, and what a wrong answer costs. Then the seat gets trained on how your business actually runs, which is never how the org chart says. Then somebody reads what it did. A staffing agency does this for people. Here it is done for software, and it does not get skipped because the employee is one.
On our side the human agents are Phil Cowan, Martin Naithani and Jill Bradbury. Martin manages product and Jill manages marketing, and both are on the AI delivery work alongside Phil.
What the seat is for, which systems it may touch, what it may do alone, what waits for sign-off, what done means, what a wrong answer costs. On paper before anything is built.
The tone of a reply, which customer gets the exception, where the real record lives. None of it is written down anywhere, and all of it goes into the seat.
What it did, what it skipped, what it handed over. Drift shows up in the log before it shows up with a customer, and somebody is reading the log.
When it is wrong, a person you can call fixes it and owns the fix. The person who enables the agent has the authority to stop it, and uses it.
The seat has an owner on both sides, and each side has a job. Ours ends with a working agent and a person who answers for the build. Yours starts on day one and does not end.
The job description, in writing. The agent, built inside your tools and trained on how you work. The rules for what it may do alone. A runbook your team can actually run on. The log, and a person reading it. And when the model or a vendor changes underneath it, the plan for that, already written.
The call on what the job is worth. The named person in your company whose name is on the seat, with the authority to stop it. The decisions the scope reserves for a person: the exception, the refund, the customer who gets a phone call instead of an email. And knowing what a wrong answer costs, because that number is yours and nobody else can set it.
Rule 03 says it for everything we ship, and it holds here: everything ships with an owner, in writing. We publish the rules we work by. Your agent needs rules too.
Access is earned the way a new hire earns it: on evidence from real work. A seat starts on drafts, with a person sending. It gets wider access when the log shows it deserves it, and never wider than the job needs. Least-privilege, in your accounts, under your control, so the keys were yours the whole time.
The same goes for the number. Two seats are never the same size, and the review and correction a seat needs are part of what it costs to run, not a line you find later. A price printed on this page would be a bluff, so the price is set in the scope, in writing, before the seat is built.
Name the person. Then name the person who changes the agent when the job changes.
We can tell you that before we build.
A seat fits when the work is bounded, repeats, has a clear done, and has a wrong answer that is cheap to catch. It does not fit when the work is a judgment call, when a wrong answer costs a relationship, or when the job is simpler as plain software with no model in it at all. The free assessment says which of the three you have. Only the first one gets a seat.
Five seats that have the shape. Each one is written as what it is for, because what it has done in your operation is a record that starts on its first day.
For the email and the form that arrive at six in the evening. A first reply from your own answers, the record opened, and the thread handed to a person with the context already in it.
For the thread that went quiet and the renewal that is sixty days out. The note is drafted while the conversation is still warm. A person still makes the call.
For copy this there, reconcile that, file it, schedule it. Nobody was hired to do it and someone does it all day. The seat does it and logs each move.
For the estimate that sits in the inbox for three days. A first pass from your own rate card and your own past quotes, ready for a person to check and send.
For the competitors, the filings, the forums and the papers nobody on your team has time to open. A brief in the morning, sources attached, in a form your team reads.