Employees Overview
Employees are autonomous AI workers that join your organization, build up org-wide knowledge over time, and act on their own initiative – not just when you ask. Where an agent waits for you to start a chat, an employee runs on its own schedule, decides what’s worth your attention, and reaches out to you and your team when it has something to say.
You hire an employee, give it a role and a goal, and from then on it works the way a real team member would: researching, scheduling its own follow-up work, writing things down so it gets sharper over time, and emailing or messaging you when it finds something that matters.
Employees vs. Agents
Section titled “Employees vs. Agents”OpsTower has two distinct ways to put AI to work. They look similar in chat, but they behave very differently.
| Agents | Employees | |
|---|---|---|
| How you start | Created, then chatted with | Hired with a guided wizard, then onboarded |
| When they work | Only when you message them (reactive) | On their own schedule, plus when you message them (proactive) |
| Scheduling | None – you drive every interaction | Schedule their own recurring and one-off tasks |
| Memory | Per-agent knowledge you attach | Accumulate durable org-level knowledge as they work |
| Outreach | Answer in chat only | Email and message you, your team, and outside contacts |
| Channels | In-app chat | In-app chat, email inbox, Telegram, voice |
| Identity | A tool you query | A team member with a name, a manager, and an email address |
In short: reach for an agent when you want to investigate something right now, and hire an employee when you want an ongoing role filled – someone who keeps watch and brings things back to you without being asked.
Employee types
Section titled “Employee types”OpsTower offers specialized employee types, each modeled on a real role. You pick a type when you hire.
Market Analyst
Section titled “Market Analyst”The Market Analyst researches your market, competitors, and product positioning, then keeps watch for shifts worth flagging. It works across three lenses:
- External – competitor launches, pricing, funding, hiring, and messaging; market themes and narratives; news mentions; and customer and community signals.
- Internal – what your team is actually doing, pulled from connected sources like Linear/Jira, code repositories, product analytics, and sales or support conversations.
- Synthesize – connecting the two, so an external signal turns into “here’s what it means for us and what we should do next.”
It sets up its own watchlists (for example, a daily competitor-blog sweep or a weekly pricing diff) and emails you when something crosses the bar for relevance, novelty, and impact.
Content Strategist
Section titled “Content Strategist”The Content Strategist plans, drafts, and learns from your organic content – blog and long-form plus social (X, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube) – and brings back contrarian bets, not status updates. It:
- Establishes and protects your company’s voice, documented in its workspace and agreed with you.
- Watches your channels (what’s published and how it’s landing) and the world’s content (competitors and adjacent voices worth learning from).
- Measures how your brand shows up in LLM answers (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity) and treats the gaps as content briefs.
- Runs content as experiments – writing down the hypothesis before publishing and the result afterward – so it gets sharper every cycle.
By default it drafts content and gets your approval before publishing, unless you grant it publishing rights for a channel.
How employees work autonomously
Section titled “How employees work autonomously”The defining feature of an employee is that it manages its own time. After onboarding, each employee runs a periodic reflection where it decides what work is worth doing, and then schedules that work itself using two kinds of tasks:
- Recurring tasks – ongoing “watch” work on a cadence (daily, weekly, monthly). This is how watchlists exist: a recurring task that sweeps every competitor blog, or a weekly review of content performance.
- One-off tasks – a single future check, such as revisiting a launch after the dust settles or following up on a rumor next week.
Each task runs on its own, produces a written result, and can lead the employee to email you, save something to its memory, or schedule more work. You can see, edit, pause, or cancel everything an employee has scheduled – and read what each run produced – from the Tasks tab.
How employees communicate
Section titled “How employees communicate”Employees don’t just sit and compute – they reach out, the way a colleague would.
- With you (their manager). Every employee has a designated manager. When there’s something worth flagging – a decision to make, work ready for review, or a question that’s blocking – the employee emails the manager. It uses judgment to batch related updates rather than pinging you once per finding.
- With other people. Employees can email people outside their manager when coordination or input is needed – always identifying themselves clearly as your company’s Market Analyst, Content Strategist, etc.
- With each other (peer learning). Employees can consult their colleagues. For example, a Content Strategist can ask an existing Market Analyst for market and positioning context instead of re-researching it from scratch. New hires also learn from existing employees during onboarding.
Channels
Section titled “Channels”You and your team can reach an employee – and an employee can reach you – through several surfaces:
- In-app chat – a full conversation interface with per-user threads and a workspace where the employee keeps files, reports, and drafts. See Managing Employees.
- Email – every employee has its own email address. Email it like you would a coworker, and it replies in the same thread. See Employee Email.
- Telegram – connect a dedicated Telegram bot so your team can message the employee from their phone. See Telegram.
- Voice – if voice mode is enabled for your account, you can talk to an employee in the chat interface.
Requirements
Section titled “Requirements”Employees are a Growth plan and above capability. Hiring also kicks off onboarding research, which spends credits, so an account that’s out of credits can’t start a new hire. See Hiring an Employee for details.
Next steps
Section titled “Next steps”- Hire your first employee with the guided wizard.
- Manage and configure an employee after hiring.
- Connect Telegram so your team can message the employee from anywhere.
- Set up email to email an employee and control who’s allowed to.