An AI employee vs the way you do it now
A spreadsheet, a shared inbox and someone who stays late is a real system. It works, it has worked for years, and it is the option every other comparison on this site is quietly competing with.
At a glance
Doing nothing is not free. It is unpriced.
No invoice arrives for the status quo, which is exactly why it survives review after review. The cost is real but it is distributed: an hour here inside a salary you already pay, a deadline that slips by a day, an invoice chased a fortnight late, a ticket answered on Monday that arrived on Friday evening.
None of those is worth a project on its own. Together they are the reason the team is busy and the work still feels behind.
The tell is the late shift
There is a shape to the work that is a candidate for delegation, and it is easy to recognise. It happens on a rhythm — daily, weekly, at month end. It is the same steps in the same order with a handful of judgement calls in the middle. It always slips to the end of the day, because it is nobody’s actual job.
Reconciling what came in against what was agreed. Chasing what is owed. Triaging a queue that filled overnight. Screening the applications that arrived this week. Assembling the same report by hand. If a person on your team can describe the process out loud in two minutes, it can be written as a job description — and a job description is the whole input.
The status quo is invisible until someone leaves
The most expensive property of the current way is not the hours. It is that the process exists mainly in the head of the person who does it. The spreadsheet has no comments, the exceptions were never written down, and the reason the third column is ignored in March is knowledge held by one person.
Handing that work to an AI employee forces it into a form you can read: a role with a written mandate, scoped credentials per system, an approval list, and a log of every run with its inputs, sources, reasoning and output. Even the part a person keeps doing gets clearer, because now it has been described.
What the first week actually looks like
Describe the role in plain language. Grant it what it needs and nothing more — read, write or send, per system, revocable immediately. Name the decisions that must wait for a person. The median time to a first employee on shift is 11 minutes, and there is no onboarding period, because it starts with a working memory of your documents and connected systems.
Run it in draft-only mode if that is more comfortable: it prepares, drafts and flags, and nothing leaves the building until someone presses approve. Then read a week of runs and decide what it should be allowed to do without you.
Where the status quo wins
Low volume. If the process runs once a quarter and takes an afternoon, the honest answer is to keep doing it by hand. Everything below a certain frequency is cheaper as a habit than as a system.
Work that is judgement all the way down. If there is no repetitive half — if every case is genuinely different and the decision is the work — then there is nothing here to hand over, and pretending otherwise would cost you more than the hours.
A process nobody can describe. If two people on the team disagree about what the steps are, that is worth resolving before anything is delegated. Writing the job description will expose it, which is useful, but the fix is a conversation, not a hire.
And adoption is a real cost, honestly counted: someone connects the systems, someone decides the permissions, someone reads the first week of runs. If nobody has that hour, the status quo will win by default — so it is better to pick one process than to start five.
Questions
We are small. Is this for us?
Starter is built for exactly that: up to three AI employees, unlimited humans, ten live workflows, and company chat across five connected systems, at $290 per AI employee per month. Small teams tend to feel the coordination load first, because there is nobody to hand it to.How much do we have to change about how we work?
Your systems stay where they are, and you reach Dutta on WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, SMS, a voice call or the Dutta app — whichever you already have open. The change that matters is not a tool: it is that a recurring piece of work stops being everyone’s spare-time job and gets an owner.What is the smallest way to start?
Pick the one process that always slips to the end of the day, and run it in draft-only mode for a week. There is a 14-day trial, no credit card and you can cancel any time — or tell us the process that eats your team’s week and a human will answer, usually within one business day.Decide it with your own process
The fastest way past a comparison page is a real one. Tell us the process that eats your team’s week and we will say plainly whether an AI employee is the right answer for it — a human replies, usually within one business day.
Talk to us · See what each role handles on shift · Pricing
Other comparisons
A general chat assistant · Hiring a person · No-code automation