The rise of digital employees: Your future colleagues may be AI.
Imagine that you've started a small business and hired five employees for R&D, customer service, sales, operations, and finance. They can not only perform their duties extremely competently but also work 24/7 without rest or complaint. Yes, these employees aren't real people but AI digital employees.
The concept of Digital Employees has attracted a lot of attention this year. Essentially, they are highly intelligent software robots that can simulate, enhance, or even autonomously complete the tasks of human employees by integrating various cutting - edge technologies.
If AI was originally just a tool or assistant for processing information in our work, now it has become an extremely capable and highly focused "colleague". What changes will an organization experience when moving from using AI to working with AI?
Phenomenon: Digital Employees Are Becoming a Trend
We've noticed that several major Internet companies have recently been promoting their newly launched digital employees.
On August 5th at the AI Day open - day event, Baidu launched its first batch of AI digital employees, covering core business functions such as marketing managers, repayment assistants, car salespeople, promotion specialists, product managers, course advisors, and recruitment specialists. Relying on the capabilities of Baidu Smart Cloud, Baidu's digital employees are ready - to - use and can perform their duties immediately upon "taking up their posts". They are characterized by "understanding business, delivering results, and being evolvable". They will be mainly applied in four major industries: education, automotive, finance, and FMCG. Corresponding typical positions include college admission advisors, 4S store sales specialists, and bank marketing specialists.
Interestingly, Baidu's digital employees also have their own exclusive images, with facial expressions and high - fidelity voices, making them "both in form and spirit".
On September 11th at the Bund Summit, Ant Group launched its first batch of expert - level "AI digital employee teams", including AI digital customer service teams, AI marketing teams, AI sales coaches, AI supervisors, and AI R & D and operation and maintenance teams. This team covers the full - link capabilities from service design, front - end communication, back - end knowledge operation, service strategy optimization to effect evaluation. It can also autonomously execute business processes such as consultation, product promotion, order placement, and reservation. During customer interactions, it can accurately identify needs, capture business opportunities, and transform the service process into new sales opportunities.
Even earlier, 1688 launched an AI digital employee e - commerce operation team for merchants, including four roles: business store managers, product specialists, customer specialists, and promotion specialists. The business store manager is responsible for formulating the full - store AI business plan, conducting financial investment - return analysis, and intelligently assigning and scheduling tasks; the product specialist is responsible for beautifying the main product images, collecting similar products and popular search terms for title optimization, and providing a 360 - degree all - around diagnosis of products; the promotion specialist is responsible for recommending promotion traffic plans, diagnosing effects, providing intelligent warnings, and generating promotion reports; the customer specialist is responsible for writing intelligent copywriting for product promotion, grouping multiple products, and providing intelligent and rapid response to inquiries to promote order placement.
Different from the digital employees of Baidu and Ant mentioned above, 1688's digital employees are specifically designed for merchants operating on its platform. They can be flexibly dispatched, and multiple business skills can be executed with a single click. Through interaction, supervision, training, and management, they can achieve "human - machine collaboration" and help small and medium - sized enterprises automate their e - commerce businesses.
Stage: Evolution from "Tool" to "Colleague"
Digital employees are not a new concept. Robotic Process Automation (RPA), which has been the "efficiency weapon" for enterprise digitization in the past decade, can be regarded as the 1.0 stage of digital employees.
RPA robots can automatically and accurately complete predefined tasks in process scenarios with clear rules and high repetition. For example, in the enterprise finance scenario, they can complete expense reimbursement reviews and invoice reconciliations; in the human resources scenario, they can complete employee information entry and attendance statistics. This can free employees from simple and repetitive labor.
However, the drawbacks of RPA robots are also obvious. They lack flexibility. Once the process changes, RPA needs manual intervention for re - debugging. Moreover, they cannot understand human intentions or interact with real people. So, they are more like mechanical arms screwing screws on an assembly line, having execution ability but lacking thinking and decision - making abilities. It's hard to call them "employees".
When RPA is combined with AI - related technologies, digital employees enter the 2.0 stage. Through technical means such as machine learning, NLP, and OCR, digital employees at this stage have preliminary "seeing, hearing, and speaking" abilities and can process some unstructured data. A typical scenario is intelligent customer service, where robot customer service can identify keywords in customers' voices or texts and match preset answers, thus solving more than 80% of the problems.
After large models with multi - modal capabilities enter the work process, digital employees finally evolve from "tools" to "colleagues". Digital employees 3.0 are the result of the combination of multiple technologies such as large models, Agents, and RPA. They can understand natural language instructions, autonomously disassemble tasks, plan steps, call tools (including commanding RPA), and make adaptive decisions to deliver final results. This has obvious advantages in scenarios such as customer service, marketing, and analysis.
The McKinsey analysis article "Digital Workforce: Digital Employees Activate the Fourth Employment Model" argues that digital employees represent the fourth enterprise employment model, distinct from the three traditional employment models of full - time employees, outsourced employees, and part - time flexible employees. As a breakthrough labor model, digital employees have begun to become the "new normal" for many enterprises. The concept of digital employees is being widely accepted by various industries and is expected to enter a period of rapid growth in the future.
Implementation cases of digital employees first emerged in fields such as finance, retail e - commerce, law, education, and public services. Part of the reason is that these fields have a high degree of business process standardization, many repetitive tasks, and more stringent requirements for efficiency and accuracy. As mentioned above, the digital employees provided by technology service companies such as Baidu, Ant, and 1688 are also first applied to customers in these fields.
Since digital employees have become the fourth enterprise employment model, there will inevitably be a corresponding labor supply and demand market. On September 16, 2025, the world's first AI digital labor market (AI worker marketplace), MuleRun (Chinese translation: "Mule Runs Fast"), was officially opened to all users. It is a platform that connects developers, providers, and users of Agents. Currently, the platform covers 12 vertical fields such as financial analysis, legal consultation, and design creation, and supports the operation of Agents in 8 languages including Chinese, English, and Japanese. Representative Agents include "Honkai: Rail Star Booster" in the game field, which can automatically complete long - term tasks in "Honkai: Star Rail"; "Blender MCP" in the design field, which can achieve high - quality and rapid modeling; "US Stock Investment Research Agent" in the financial field, which can generate professional analysis reports; and "Nano Banana series Agent" in the content field, which can create popular social media content.
According to the plan, MuleRun will build a "global digital labor pool" containing 100,000 AI Agents before 2026, further breaking the circulation barriers of knowledge and skills and redefining the value distribution method of the knowledge economy in the era of human - machine collaboration.
What's the Value of Humans in the Era of Human - Machine Collaboration?
Your only more hard - working "colleague" is your "virtual colleague". It never gets tired, is highly focused, has extremely strong learning ability, and is very efficient at work. How should we handle the relationship with our "virtual colleagues"? This is probably a question that every organization and individual will have to consider in the future.
First of all, how should human employees and digital employees divide the work? A study from the School of Economics and Management at Tsinghua University, "Digital Employees Reshape Job Design in Organizational Management", argues that the collaborative relationship between human employees and digital employees can be considered from two dimensions: "task complexity" and "interpersonal interaction", and can be divided into four models:
Machine Automation Model (low complexity - low interpersonal interaction): Digital employees independently execute repetitive tasks, and humans monitor them.
Human - Led Model (low complexity - high interpersonal interaction): Humans are responsible for communication, and digital employees provide information assistance.
Machine - Led Model (high complexity - low interpersonal interaction): Digital employees process complex data analysis, and humans provide strategic guidance.
Human Management Model (high complexity - high interpersonal interaction): Humans handle complex decision - making and emergencies, and digital employees provide data support.
That is to say, digital employees take over a large number of repetitive and routine tasks (such as data entry, regular customer service, and report generation), thus freeing human employees from tedious labor and allowing them to focus on work that requires more creativity, strategic thinking, and emotional communication, such as strategic planning, innovation R & D, and complex customer relationship management.
The addition of digital employees will also change the organizational form. The traditional pyramid - shaped management structure will be abandoned and replaced by a flat and networked structure. Among them, the space for middle - level managers will be greatly compressed because tasks such as reporting, budgeting, and assessment, which involve conveying information from top to bottom and statistical sorting, will be perfectly replaced by AI. It will be very easy for a leader to directly manage grass - roots employees.
Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired magazine, believes that there will be two extreme trends in the future form of enterprises: on the one hand, large enterprises can become even larger, and in the future, there may even be super - large enterprises with more than one million employees; on the other hand, one - person or two - person companies will also become very common, and the first super - individual with annual sales exceeding one billion US dollars will soon appear.
As mentioned at the beginning of this article, you can completely form a digital employee team to work for you. That is to say, with the support of AI, starting a business will become easier.
Lars Tvede, a serial entrepreneur, financial investor, venture capitalist, futurist, and author of "Superintelligence and the Future", also believes that in the future, we may see more one - person unicorn enterprises, that is, companies composed of one person and a large number of AI agents. AI will enable ordinary people to transform ideas into actual products or services.
Tvede optimistically points out that if applied appropriately, AI can create a more human - centered society.
"The greatest opportunity brought by artificial intelligence is that it gives us a chance to rethink what is valuable and what gives meaning to life. By freeing humans from repetitive labor, we can pay more attention to art, emotion, creativity, and interpersonal connection - these are the most unique and irreplaceable qualities of humans. This is not only a technological revolution but also a re - orientation of human civilization."
This article is from the WeChat official account "Yibang Power". The author is Zhang Rui. It is published by 36Kr with permission.