Decision guide
Chatbot or AI employee: which to pick
Pick a chatbot when the conversation is the whole job. Pick an AI employee when the job continues after the answer: a record to update, a booking to make, a follow-up three days later. The dividing line is what still has to happen once the visitor closes the window.
Two cheap questions settle most cases. Does the answer already live in material you own, and does anyone have to act on it afterwards? A widget covers the first on its own. The second wants a role with stored material, a schedule and a person on the send.
Seven cases, decided
Read down the left column and stop at the first line that describes your situation.
| When this is true | Pick | Why |
|---|---|---|
| The visitor asks one thing and leaves | Chatbot | Nothing to update afterwards, nothing to chase. |
| The answer has to reach a CRM record, a calendar or an inbox | AI employee | The role drafts the follow-up work alongside the reply, and the run is journaled with its outcome. |
| A handful of conversations a day | Chatbot | The follow-up still fits in someone's afternoon. |
| The same question keeps arriving with your context attached | AI employee | Your material is stored as knowledge items and read into the prompt on every run, so the answer holds still. |
| Nobody needs a record of what happened overnight | Chatbot | The transcript covers it. |
| Money or a customer-sensitive action is involved | AI employee | Approval rules, spend caps and a kill switch are checked before every outbound write. |
| You want a two-week test before committing | Either | A widget goes up in an afternoon. The Starter plan includes a 14-day pilot with one employee in production. |
The mechanism behind each of those answers — memory, cadence, the job queue, the approval gate — is laid out side by side on AI employee vs. chatbot vs. assistant.
What a role needs from you
Three things, and none of them is code. Configuration from a role template takes under an hour, and the Starter plan includes a 14-day pilot with one employee in production.
01 · The brief
The job in plain language: tasks, tone, the rules it runs under, and what a good outcome looks like. Every run reads from it.
02 · The material
Help pages, past answers, the service list, prices. These become knowledge items the role rereads instead of guessing.
03 · The limits
Which actions need a human yes, and what the spend cap is. Both are stored as records and checked at the gate.
The role most owners start with is the support desk — what it drafts, what it escalates and what the first month looks like is on AI customer support agent.
Frequently asked questions
Yes, and it is a common split. The widget answers on the page in the same second, and the work that continues after that answer goes to the role. Today the handoff is a form post to our lead endpoint, which lands the request as one record and emails you when it arrives.
Configuration from a role template takes under an hour and needs no code. Connecting Meta takes a System User token and an ad account id, entered once. Week one usually runs in shadow mode: the role drafts, a person checks every answer against its source, and you get a real accuracy number before anything depends on it.
A brief, your material and your limits. The brief describes the job and the tone. The material is help pages, past answers, service list and prices, stored as knowledge items. The limits say which actions wait for a human yes and what the spend cap is.
A digital employee costs more per month than a widget: $149 on Starter, $599 on Scale, custom on Enterprise. The rate is per digital employee per month, with no per-seat, per-message or per-token metering, and Starter comes with a 14-day pilot.
It depends on how fast the answer has to arrive. A role covers the same repeat questions and does the follow-up work behind them, and a person sends its reply today, so a widget still earns its place where an answer has to land in the same second the question is asked.
Start with one role and one channel
Pick the job that already repeats, brief it in plain language, and read the journal at the end of week one.