Maturity
Seven levels, one ladder
From Tool to Hybrid Enterprise. Levels 0 to 3 are legitimate destinations, not failures — a well-placed assistant can produce more value than a supposed AI Employee nobody supervises.
- 0
Tool
Generates content or responds. Does not act.
- 1
Assistant
Uses context to help a human.
- 2
Agent
Executes bounded tasks with tools.
- 3
Role agent
Owns the recurring workflows of a defined role.
- 4
AI Employee
Where the test can be met
The nine properties of the definition, exhibited in operation.
- 5
AI Team
Multiple AI Employees coordinated with shared context.
- 6
Hybrid Enterprise
Humans and AI Employees under one integrated model of organization, permissions and governance.
The ladder maps evolution of capacity and scale; it does not decide membership. Level 4 names the point where a deployment can exhibit the nine properties of the definition — whether it actually does is decided by the test, never by the level. Levels 0 to 3 are legitimate destinations, not failures — a well-placed assistant can produce more value than a supposed AI Employee nobody supervises.
Self-diagnosis
Diagnose what you actually have
Take your most important AI implementations and examine them without the name the vendor gave them. Five questions, answered honestly.
- 01
Does it act, or only produce output?
- 02
Does it hold a recurring role, or only discrete tasks?
- 03
Following its supervision chain upward, does it reach a named human?
- 04
Can you reconstruct what it did last Tuesday and under whose authority?
- 05
Can it be suspended today, by someone who knows they own that decision?
You may find twenty agents and zero AI Employees. That does not invalidate the work done — it shows what is missing before responsibility can be widened: contract, context, authority, metrics, observability or a manager.