TMI / GLOSSARY
DIGITAL EMPLOYEE
Definition. A digital employee is a system that owns a defined piece of recurring work from beginning to end, has a human owner, and can be held to a standard it is capable of failing.
WHAT IT
MEANS.
The useful part of the phrase is the word employee, and specifically the expectations that come with it. A job has a scope, an owner, a standard and consequences when it is not met. An automation usually has none of those: it runs, and if it stops running somebody notices eventually.
So a digital employee is a management idea before it is a technical one. The work has to be defined tightly enough that completion is unambiguous. Someone human has to own the outcome. There has to be a way for it to fail loudly rather than silently, because the failure mode that costs real money is the one nobody sees for a fortnight.
Where the bar is met, this is genuinely different from a script. Where it is not, calling it a digital employee is marketing, and TMI would rather call it an automation and be accurate.
WHAT IT
IS NOT.
A virtual assistant
A VA is a person, with judgment, context and the ability to tell you that the request does not make sense. Those are not small differences and the two are not substitutes.
A chatbot
A chatbot answers. A digital employee completes work and is accountable for the result.
Every term in this glossary is one TMI uses in client work, which is the only reason it is here. The rest of the glossary →
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