What an “AI employee” actually is, and what it is not

“AI employee” is marketing language, including on this site. It is worth unpicking, because the word employee carries a set of expectations that the software mostly does not meet, and the gap between those expectations and reality is where disappointment comes from.

What the comparison gets right

An employee is someone you hand a responsibility to and stop thinking about. That part is fair. A system that answers every enquiry the moment it arrives, in your business's voice, without being reminded, genuinely does remove a category of work from your head — and it does it at hours no employee would agree to.

What it gets wrong

• An employee notices when something is off and tells you. Software answers what it was asked and nothing more
• An employee builds judgement over years. This gets better only where somebody corrects it, and only in the areas they correct
• An employee can be accountable. Software cannot, which means the accountability stays with you
• An employee can say “that is not what we do” and be right. Software needs to have been told

None of that makes the tool less useful. It makes it a different kind of thing — closer to a very reliable process than to a colleague, and processes need someone watching them.

What happens to what customers type

This is the question worth asking any vendor in this category, and it gets asked far less than it should. Enquiries contain names, phone numbers, addresses and sometimes a description of somebody's problem. That is personal information, and in Canada handling it in the course of commercial activity brings PIPEDA obligations with it — what you collect, what you use it for, how long you keep it, and who else can see it.

The practical version: ask where the data is stored, which third parties process it, and what happens to it if you stop being a customer. A vendor who cannot answer those three questions quickly has not thought about them. The Privacy Commissioner's guidance for businesses is linked below and is a better starting point than any vendor's summary, this one included.

“Ask a vendor where the enquiry data goes. The speed of the answer tells you more than its content.”

How to judge one

Ignore the demo, which is always good. Ask what it does when it does not know something — whether it guesses, stalls, or hands over to a person and says so. That single behaviour separates the tools that make a business look competent from the ones that make it look automated, and it is the thing you will notice on the enquiry that matters most.