One thing seems certain: people are not ready for “digital workers” yet.
This is the lesson that Sarah Franklin, CEO of structurean HR and performance management platform that provides performance coaching, talent reviews, onboarding automation, compensation management, and a suite of other HR tools to over 5,000 organizations worldwide.
What is a digital employee? According to To FranklinThese people who have entered the workforce and become our colleagues are symbolic figures like Devin the engineer, Harvey the lawyer, Einstein the service agent, and Piper the sales agent. But these are not real workers. They are AI-powered robots. They have been introduced by companies like the CRM giant Salesforce and startups like Perception.i And Eligible Doing work for people.
Sales force EinsteinFor example, computer programs specialized in sales and marketing can help forecast revenue, complete tasks, and coordinate with leads. Devin, a software engineer at Cognition, can plan and execute complex engineering tasks that require thousands of decisions, remembering relevant context at each step, learning over time, and fixing her mistakes. Piper, a sales rep at Qualified, works around the clock to convert incoming website traffic into a pipeline, and she is “smart, hardworking, and hits her pipeline goals.” None of these agents—as far as I can tell—need health insurance, paid vacation, or retirement plans, either.
Franklin saw an opportunity and decided to take advantage of it. On July 9, The company said It will start supporting digital employees as part of its platform and treating them like any other employee.
“Today, Lattice is making history in AI,” Franklin said. “We will be the first to give digital workers official employee records at Lattice. Digital workers will be securely trained, assigned performance goals and metrics, have access to appropriate systems, and even a manager. Just like everyone else.”
The response was swift—and in many cases, brutal, especially on LinkedInwhich is not generally known for its savage engagement like X (formerly known as Twitter).
“This strategy and messaging is missing the mark in a big way, and I say that as someone who is building an AI company,” said Sauer Midler, an executive at a company that uses AI to help with sales research. LinkedIn“Treating AI agents as employees is disrespectful of the humanity of your real employees. Worse, it means you view humans as mere ‘resources’ to be optimized and measured against machines. This is the exact opposite of a work environment designed to elevate the people who contribute to it.”
Scott Burgess, a self-employed marketing executive, was more blunt.
“Terrifying,” he said. It was published.“The more AI is used everywhere, the more I feel like this crap is going to ruin everything. Workers are already struggling enough and now they have to compete with ‘AI workers.’”[.] Can we return it to its box and send it back?
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The backlash—which made the post even worthy of the dubious honor of being included in the “LinkedIn CrazyFranklin’s announcement of her intention to launch her new company was enough to force her to put her company plans on hold three days after the announcement.
These concerns are certainly valid. But was Franklin wrong? Aren’t “digital employees” inevitable?
There’s no question that AI is overhyped right now. We’ve seen the embarrassing failures of Google’s AI-generated output. We’ve seen the less-than-stellar performance of Microsoft’s Copilot AI. We know that, for all the predictions, forecasts, and predictions, AI is still in its infancy. Even the aforementioned AI-powered “digital assistants” are known to be only capable of performing the most rudimentary tasks so far — at least from what I hear from my clients and read in Some surveys – Most executives correctly believe that AI at a young age cannot be trusted like a toddler.
Franklin made the same mistake that MicrosoftGoogle and other big tech platforms have hyped something that wasn’t ready for the big time for marketing advantage. You can’t blame them for their vision. They just, like so many others, executed that vision too early. It’s still early days for AI, and humans are still trying to come to terms with its implications. There will certainly be “digital employees” who will perform better than most human employees in the not-too-distant future. We just don’t know when that future will be. It’s clearly not now.
