What people mean by an AI coworker
An AI coworker is software you delegate to rather than operate: it holds a standing job, works where your team already talks, and asks when it is out of its depth. The word is doing real work in that sentence, and this page is about which part of it is true and which part is marketing.
Concretely
- It holds a job across days, not a session you start each time.
- It works in Slack and Microsoft Teams where the request came up.
- It asks before anything it cannot undo, per kind of action.
- It keeps a record another person on the team can read.
- It can be corrected, and the correction sticks.
Coworker, agent, assistant, chatbot
These get used interchangeably and they should not be. A chatbot answers. An assistant answers and drafts, when you ask. An agent takes a goal and acts, usually inside a shape somebody configured. A coworker is the one with a standing job: nobody re-briefs it each morning, it knows what it owns, and it comes back when something is outside that.
The part that is honest
A coworker holds a job, keeps a memory of how your business does things, works on a schedule, and can be corrected in a way that lasts. Those are real properties, and they are the reason the word gets used. You can check each of them on any product claiming the label, and most fail two or three.
The part that is marketing
It is not a person. It has no judgment about your customers that you did not give it, it has no stake in the outcome, and it will do the wrong thing confidently if the job description was vague. Anyone selling you a coworker who does not want to talk about what it hands back to a human is selling you the word rather than the thing.
What to ask before you believe the label
Four questions. Does it hold a job when nobody is asking it anything? Does it work where my team already is, or in another tab? What happens when it is unsure, and can I set that per kind of action rather than per app? And can somebody who was not there read what it did? A product that answers all four is a coworker. A product that answers none is a chatbot with a better word on the pricing page.
The jobs this comes from
Sanaf holds thirty five written job descriptions. These are the ones behind this page.