Digital Employees
Hire a role.
Not a person.
A digital employee owns a job end to end — intake, triage, follow-up, reporting — and escalates the moment it should. It works inside your systems, on your infrastructure, and you own every line of it.
Typically live in 6–12 weeks.
You own everything
Repos, cloud accounts, API keys, data — all in your name from day one.
Runs on your infrastructure
Your cloud, your region, your access controls. Nothing is hostage to a runtime we rent you.
Your data trains nothing
We build on paid API tiers where provider terms exclude training on your inputs.
Auditable by design
Every action logged and traceable, so you can answer "why did it do that?".
What it does
Not a chat box. A colleague.
The difference between AI that impresses in a demo and AI that survives a Tuesday is whether anyone scoped what it owns.
It owns the whole task
Not a chat box that answers questions — a system that holds state across a full job, calls your real APIs, and hands back finished work.
It knows when to stop
Explicit escalation rules, written with you. Anything outside them goes to a human with the full context attached, not a shrug.
It runs on your stack
Your cloud, your database, your keys. Wired into the CRM, inbox, and ticketing system you already pay for.
You can audit every move
Every action it takes is logged and traceable. When somebody asks why it did that, there is an answer.
The change
It works the shift nobody wants.
Nights, weekends, and the third identical request of the morning — handled before anyone clocks in.
- The same forty questions, answered by hand, every week
- Requests sitting unread overnight and across the weekend
- Salaried people doing work with no judgment in it
- A busy month means overtime, or a temp who needs training
- Routine requests handled the moment they arrive
- Covered at 2am, on holidays, and straight through a spike
- Your team moved onto the work that needs a person
- More volume costs throughput, not another headcount
Anything outside the rules you set escalates to a human — with the full thread attached, not a shrug.
The honest comparison
Weigh it against the alternatives.
Sometimes hiring a person is the right answer, and sometimes a chat subscription genuinely covers it. Here is where each one actually wins.
| Digital employee | A new hire | DIY with ChatGPT | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Time to productive | 6–12 weeks, then permanent | Months of recruiting, then ramp-up | Instant, then plateaus fast |
| Cost shape | One build, then hosting | Salary, benefits, tools, management — every year | Per-seat subscription, forever |
| Hours covered | Every hour of every day | A working week, minus leave | Only while someone is typing |
| Handling more volume | Same system, higher throughput | Another hire, another salary | Another person copy-pasting |
| Consistency | Same rules every time, logged | Varies by person and by day | Varies with whoever wrote the prompt |
| Knows your systems | Wired directly into your APIs and data | After onboarding, and again for the next hire | Nothing — copy in, copy out |
| Institutional memory | Stays when people leave | Walks out with them | Lives in scattered chat histories |
| Who owns the output | You — code, data, and all | You | Your data sits in someone else's logs |
Time to productive
- Digital employee
- 6–12 weeks, then permanent
- A new hire
- Months of recruiting, then ramp-up
- DIY with ChatGPT
- Instant, then plateaus fast
Cost shape
- Digital employee
- One build, then hosting
- A new hire
- Salary, benefits, tools, management — every year
- DIY with ChatGPT
- Per-seat subscription, forever
Hours covered
- Digital employee
- Every hour of every day
- A new hire
- A working week, minus leave
- DIY with ChatGPT
- Only while someone is typing
Handling more volume
- Digital employee
- Same system, higher throughput
- A new hire
- Another hire, another salary
- DIY with ChatGPT
- Another person copy-pasting
Consistency
- Digital employee
- Same rules every time, logged
- A new hire
- Varies by person and by day
- DIY with ChatGPT
- Varies with whoever wrote the prompt
Knows your systems
- Digital employee
- Wired directly into your APIs and data
- A new hire
- After onboarding, and again for the next hire
- DIY with ChatGPT
- Nothing — copy in, copy out
Institutional memory
- Digital employee
- Stays when people leave
- A new hire
- Walks out with them
- DIY with ChatGPT
- Lives in scattered chat histories
Who owns the output
- Digital employee
- You — code, data, and all
- A new hire
- You
- DIY with ChatGPT
- Your data sits in someone else's logs
Run the numbers
What is that task costing you?
Move the sliders to match your team. Nothing is sent anywhere and nothing is stored — this runs entirely in your browser.
Your numbers
Think of one repetitive task your team does every week.
What that costs today
$93,600
per year, on 2,080 hours of the same task
- Hours returned each year
- 1,248
- Annual cost absorbed
- $56,160
- Payback on the build
- 5.3 months
This is arithmetic on the numbers you entered, not a projection and not a promise. Real outcomes depend on how messy the task is and how quickly your team adopts it — which is exactly what the first conversation is for.
Also from the studio
Digital employees are not all we build.
Same team, same process. If your project is one of these, it is exactly as welcome as the flagship.
Proof — our own product
A career operating system for the U.S. job market.
Our flagship product, built and operated in-house. A web platform plus a Chrome extension that reads job postings, tailors resumes against them, autofills applications across 24 applicant tracking systems, and answers work-authorization questions correctly.
24
applicant tracking systems supported by the autofill engine
~435
company job boards pulled directly, with no aggregator in between
3
shipped surfaces — web app, Chrome extension, and native mobile
How we work
Four steps, and you can leave after any of them.
No twelve-month contracts and no lock-in. Every stage produces something you keep whether or not there is a next one.
Discover
A paid short engagement, not a free pitch. We learn your workflow, your constraints, and what success would actually have to look like. You leave with a written scope whether or not you continue with us.
Prototype
Something real in your hands within two weeks. Not a slide deck and not a demo video — a working thing you can use, break, and react to while the direction is still cheap to change.
Build
Weekly shipping against the scope, on infrastructure you own. You get access to the repo from day one, and every week ends with something deployed rather than something described.
Operate
Software that acts on your behalf needs someone watching it. We monitor, tune, and extend — or we train your team to and hand over the keys. Both are fine; we say which one we recommend.
Questions
The things nobody asks out loud.
Still unanswered? Ask us directly — you will get a straight reply.
An AI system scoped like a job rather than like a feature. We define what it owns, what it must never touch, what good looks like, and who it escalates to — then build to that. In practice it is an agent with a job description, integrations into your tools, and reporting on its own performance.
ChatGPT is a person doing the work faster. A digital employee is the work happening without a person. It runs on a schedule or a trigger rather than a prompt, reads and writes to your real systems, follows rules you set once, and leaves an audit trail. If a chat tool genuinely solves your problem, we will tell you to save your money and use it.
It depends almost entirely on scope — how many systems it has to touch, how messy the data is, and how much has to be got right the first time. We do not publish rates because a number without a scope is either a guess or a trap. Tell us what you are trying to do and we will give you a real figure quickly, usually on the first call.
Six to twelve weeks for most digital employees, two to six for a focused automation. You will have something running in your hands inside the first two weeks either way — we would rather you react to a real thing early than approve a document.
You do. Repos, cloud accounts, API keys, and data are in your name from day one, and you have access to the repository from the first commit. There is no proprietary runtime you have to keep renting from us. If you stop working with us, everything keeps running.
It will, occasionally — anything that touches real language does. That is why escalation rules and logging are designed in from the start rather than added after an incident. You decide which actions require a human to approve, and every decision is traceable after the fact.
It runs on your infrastructure, in your cloud, under your access controls. We build on paid API tiers whose terms exclude training on your inputs. We are a small studio and do not hold a SOC 2 report — if your procurement process requires one, say so early and we will tell you honestly whether we can clear it.
Not necessarily. Software that acts on your behalf does need somebody watching it, so either we operate it for you or we train your team and hand over the runbook. Both work. We will tell you which one we think fits your team rather than defaulting to the one that bills more.
No — we also build product and marketing sites, automation and integration work, browser extensions, and strategy sprints. Digital employees lead here because it is the work we are asked for most. If your project is one of the others, it is the same team and the same process.
Then we say so, ideally before you have spent anything. A good share of what gets asked for should not be built, and more of it is smaller than it first looks. Telling you that costs us a project and earns the next three.
Tell us what you want to stop doing by hand.
Send a couple of paragraphs about the problem. You will get a real reply from a person who could build it, usually within two business days.