Open administrative standard · v1.0.1 · Candidate — pending Board ratification
A chatbot answers.A copilot helps.An agent executes a task.An AI Employee holds a role.A human remains accountable.
The category already exists in the market. What is missing is the administrative layer: what turns an agent into a governable member of the workforce, who answers for it, what it may decide, and how anyone can tell a work resource apart from a commercial metaphor.
Vocabulary
Where the boundary falls
Each rung is a legitimate destination. The category only becomes useful once it stops applying to everything.
| Term | Core promise | Typical behavior | Main limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chatbot | Conversation | Answers questions | Waits for prompts or inputs |
| Copilot / assistant | Augment the human | Drafts, summarizes, suggests | The human is still the operator |
| Automation / RPA | Deterministic execution | Runs predefined flows | Brittle against unforeseen cases |
| AI agent | Goal-directed action | Reasons, uses tools, executes | Usually centered on tasks or objectives |
| AI teammate / coworker | Collaboration | Shares context and executes work | Organizational semantics vary by vendor |
| AI Employee | Stewardship of a role | Holds recurring work under governance | The category lacked a shared operational standard; this document proposes one |
The definition
An AI Employee is a persistent, role-bound software worker that autonomously executes recurring business responsibilities using organizational knowledge and authorized tools, within explicit policies and limits, maintaining traceable identity, measurable performance, escalation paths and human accountability.The nine-property test
Nine properties. Miss one and it is an agent, which is fine as long as nobody calls it an employee.
- 01Persistent identity
- 02Defined operational role
- 03Organizational context
- 04Tools and channels
- 05Autonomy
- 06Limited authority
- 07Governed memory
- 08Observability
- 09Human accountability
Scope
What this is, and what it refuses to be
It is
- A test an organization can run on its own deployment.
- Twenty-seven normative clauses, cited by identifier.
- A framework for deciding who holds the position — human, assisted human or artificial — before choosing a tool.
- Self-declared conformance, published if the organization chooses.
It is not
- A certification. No product is scored, no seal is issued.
- A vendor ranking or a maturity assessment sold to competitors.
- A funnel for the author’s platform — which, under HWF-71, can never claim conformance with this standard.
- A legal claim that software can be employed.
v1.0.1
The standard
Twenty-seven clauses in eight blocks, none of them optional. A short standard that fully binds is more useful than a long one that mostly suggests.
- HWF-01
People are ends; software is a means. Optimization of cost, speed or capacity must never override human rights, dignity, safety, meaningful human agency, accessibility or applicable labor protections. Resource neutrality begins only after those constraints are satisfied. This clause takes precedence over every other clause in this standard.
- HWF-02
Certain decisions are reserved. An artificial resource must never be the sole decider in matters with material effect on hiring, termination, discipline or compensation; on health and safety; on credit, insurance or access to essential services; on legal rights; on any use of force; or on the treatment of vulnerable people. A reserved decision is Critical by definition, whatever the assessed class of the position. Reservation does not exclude artificial participation — analysis, drafting and recommendation may be delegated. The decision itself may not, and an approval by a human who cannot restate the case and decide otherwise is a signature, not a decision.
- HWF-03
No position may be materially transformed — automated, moved to or from assisted human, returned to a person, or retired — without a recorded human impact assessment, completed before the transition begins. The assessment must name who is affected and how: changes to work, autonomy and surveillance; the risk of deskilling; the intensified load on those who absorb the exceptions; discrimination and accessibility; displacement and headcount; training and reassignment; effects on customers and third parties. Affected workers and their representatives must be informed and consulted before the transformation, not after it. The assessment is not required to reach a favorable conclusion; it is required to name, measure and govern the consequences.
- HWF-04
A person materially affected by an AI Employee’s action holds rights against the deployment: to know that an artificial system took part; to know which organization answers for it; to have the decision reviewed by a human with authority to change it; to correct the data it relied on; to contest it; to receive a comprehensible explanation of its determinants; and to obtain redress where the decision was wrong. The explanation owed is operational evidence — the policy applied, the data relied on, the tools consulted and the authority exercised — never a reasoning transcript, and it is released through human judgment: privileged or confidential material may be withheld, every withholding is recorded with its reason, and confidentiality may narrow an explanation but never cancels the duty to give one the person can act on.
- HWF-11
An AI Employee must hold a defined role, not merely a persona or a system prompt.
WRM
The framework underneath
The standard governs the occupant. WRM governs the work, and the work comes first.
WRM — Work Resource Management — is the discipline that designs, assigns, governs and optimizes work regardless of whether the resource executing it is human or artificial.
Universal
Principles of work administration that hold regardless of who executes.
Adapted
Human principles that keep an equivalent function but change mechanism.
Exclusively human
Rights, needs and experiences that follow from the human condition.
HWFA
The instrument
Thirteen dimensions, one responsibility at a time. It returns an argument you can defend in a meeting rather than a number you can hide behind.
Run the assessment