How to onboard ‘digital employees’

Key takeaways

• Increasingly, companies are integrating AI agents into their workflows

• These “digital employees” need guidelines and oversight akin to human employees

• That includes identifying the right roles and creating reporting structures

Last year saw the emergence of the AI agent; 2026 may be the year it gets a job. In fact, some of the biggest companies in the world have already started hiring.

McKinsey recently announced it added 25,000 “digital employees” to complement its 40,000-person strong workforce. Goldman Sachs has deployed “Devin,” its first autonomous software engineer to join the ranks of its 12,000 human developers, while Ford unveiled an automated sales agent named Otto as an “always-on teammate” for its sales operation. Pharma giant Moderna has gone so far as to merge its IT and HR departments, to better manage the overlap between digital and human talent pools. 

It seems like every organization is either deploying AI agents or thinking hard about it. Surveys by global consultancy Protiviti show that 7 out of 10 businesses plan to integrate agents into their current workflows in 2026. Up to 84% will use them to take on ITSM functions, while more than half will deploy them in customer service roles. 

But while the hype cycle seems to imply AI agents are poised to replace everything from software engineers to entire SaaS platforms, the reality is more useful, and more nuanced. Indeed, while it’s tempting to think of autonomous agents as “super employees” who are available 24/7, never call in sick, and won’t ever get bored, this metaphor only extends so far. AI agents are most powerful when they work within the systems businesses already use, and they require far more supervision than your average human. 

"There's a lot of noise right now about AI replacing everything,” says Ashwin Ballal, CIO of Freshworks. “But the real value isn't in adding more tools or layers to your stack. It's in helping teams get more from the systems they already depend on. Agents should simplify how work gets done, not introduce new complexity."

And whether you give them names and call them employees or simply treat them as highly sophisticated tools, autonomous agents are carving out a niche in the modern workforce. But organizations need to be at least as careful on-boarding their AI employees as they are with their flesh-and-blood counterparts. That includes everything from identifying the right roles and creating precise job descriptions to establishing workplace rules and sufficient oversight.

Here are the key questions each company needs to answer.

Do you even need an agent for this?

Before bringing on a new artificial employee, organizations need to make sure they’re assigning AI agents to the right jobs for the right reasons, says Mark Campbell, principal of 3dot Insights, a consultancy focused on emerging tech. Adopting agentic solutions gives businesses an opportunity to re-examine existing workflows and streamline or abandon those that no longer add value, he says. Companies that don’t have their workflows in order first will have AI agents that end up automating the wrong things. At best, that’s a waste of a hire, and at worst, it could wreak havoc on a business.

“Organizations need to ask, ‘Should we really still be doing this?’” Campbell adds. “Does that approval loop still need to be there, or can you have one AI agent chat with another agent and bypass all of that? This kind of process re-engineering often doesn’t happen.”

What rules do they need to follow?

You wouldn’t onboard a new employee without a handbook. But that’s exactly what many companies do when first deploying AI, says Trent Cotton, head of talent insights and analyst relations for iCIMS, a talent acquisition platform.

“You need strong governance that dictates how agents are built, how they operate, and who audits them,” says Cotton. “When something goes wrong, who’s responsible for cleaning up the mess? The biggest place companies stumble is by not starting with that.”

iCIMS has established an industry-certified Responsible AI framework based on principles of fairness, transparency, privacy, and accountability. But Cotton advises that every organization’s governance will look a little different, depending on their industry and compliance requirements. 

What are you hiring them to do?

A key requirement for successfully on-boarding an AI employee is putting strict limits on the data and systems it can access, and determining the degree of autonomy they’re allowed before humans are brought into the loop. 

“You need to specify what data the AI agent has access to, what types of output are appropriate, and at what point it must pass responses onto a human,” says Tiberiu Trandaburu, CEO of Uptalen, a European tech staffing company. “There can be no ambiguity with regard to what the AI does, and the way it interacts with humans can be defined in one simple rule: The AI proposes and the humans decide.”

How do you know they’re doing a good job? 

With AI, performance reviews are constant, as it leaves a stream of data wherever it goes. As such, every organization needs to establish clear KPIs and performance metrics for each agent, continually assess their output, and fine-tune as needed, and prove the ROI of AI.

For example, Chicago’s E-Zmovers & Storage added three full-time AI dispatch agents to help its 200-plus employees find the most efficient routes across town. The agents were fed route information, customer service protocols, and a history of driver delays, then measured against the typical performance of human employees.

“Each of the AI agents has a quarterly performance review identical to the one used for our human dispatchers,” says co-founder and CEO Steven David. “Each review includes data relating to timeliness, cost savings due to the reduction in labor hours, and the accuracy of the data entered into our system. At the end of the last quarter, our average accuracy was 91% and we reduced long-haul travel times by 2.7 hours.”

Who’s the boss of that bot? 

Every organization needs to decide who’s ultimately responsible for a digital employee’s performance. Is it the tech team that designed the agent? The business unit that deployed it? HR personnel tasked with managing the performance of all employees, human or otherwise? All of the above?

At Broad River Retail, a regional furniture chain based in South Carolina, that responsibility fell to a member of its customer experience team. Last year the retailer appointed its first “bot manager,” responsible for ensuring that its digital and human support agents were working in alignment and monitoring the digital agent’s interactions with customers. At Moderna, the tech team that built and maintains the healthcare giant’s 3,000 custom GPT models reports to leaders in HR.

But this is mostly uncharted territory, and organizations are only just beginning to grapple with these questions, says Ed Brzychcy, founder of the Lead from the Front business practice consultancy and a visiting assistant professor at Babson College. 

AI agents can impact every part of an organization—from legal and compliance to security and IT operations, with multiple stops in between. That means top management needs to be involved in their creation and oversight, Brzychcy warns. Organizations must also be alert to “shadow AI,” where individual employees spin up their own agents without oversight or permission. 

“The questions you need to ask are ‘What decisions are we delegating to that agent, and what does accountability look like when the tool fails?’” he says. “You need to make sure that all the appropriate agencies within the organization understand what’s being integrated and how it’s being used.”