The world is not quite ready for ‘digital workers’ yet

What is a digital employee? According to Franklin, they are avatars like Devin the engineer, Harvey the lawyer, Einstein the service agent and Piper the salesperson who “have entered the world of work and become our colleagues.” But they are not real workers. They are AI-powered robots. They have been introduced by companies like customer relationship management giant Salesforce and startups like Cognition.ai and Qualified to perform tasks in place of humans.

Salesforce’s Einstein, for example, can help sales and marketing professionals forecast revenue, complete tasks, and connect with prospects. Devin, a software engineer at Cognition, can plan and execute complex engineering tasks requiring thousands of decisions, while remembering the relevant context at each step as she learns and corrects her own mistakes. Piper, a sales rep at Qualified, “works around the clock to convert inbound website traffic into pipeline” and is “bright, hardworking, and exceeds her pipeline goals.” None of these agents—as far as I know—need health insurance, paid vacation, or retirement plans.

Seeing an opportunity, Franklin decided to take advantage of it. On July 9, the company announced that it would begin supporting digital workers as part of its platform and treating them like any other employee.

“Today, Lattice is making AI history,” Franklin said. “We will be the first to provide digital workers with official employee records in Lattice. Digital workers will be onboarded, trained, and given goals, performance metrics, access to the right systems, and even a manager in a secure environment. Just like any other person would be.”

The reaction was swift — and, in many cases, brutal, especially on LinkedIn, which isn’t typically known for wild engagement like X (formerly known as Twitter).

“This strategy and messaging are completely off base, and I say this as the founder of an AI company,” Sawyer Middeleer, an executive at a company that uses AI to help with business research, said on LinkedIn. “Treating AI agents like employees is disrespectful to the humanity of your real employees. Worse, it implies that you are treating humans as mere ‘resources’ to be optimized and measured against machines. This is the exact opposite of a workplace designed to elevate the people who contribute to it.”

Scott Burgess, an independent marketing executive, was even more direct.

“This is terrifying,” he wrote. “The more AI is used everywhere, the more I start to think this shit is going to ruin everything. Workers have a hard enough time already and now they have to compete with ‘AI workers’. Can we just put it back in its box and send it back?”

The backlash — which even earned the post the dubious honor of being included in the LinkedIn Lunatics subreddit — was enough to force Franklin to shelve his company’s plans three days after his announcement.

Of course, these concerns are legitimate. But was Franklin wrong? Aren’t “digital employees” inevitable?

There’s no denying that AI is currently overrated. We’ve seen the embarrassing failures of Google’s AI results. We’ve seen the less-than-stellar performance of Microsoft’s Copilot AI offering. We know that for all the predictions, prognostications, and predictions, AI is still in its infancy. Even the AI-powered “digital assistants” mentioned above are only capable of performing the most rudimentary tasks so far, and—at least from what I hear from my clients and read in some surveys—most executives rightly consider AI at its earliest stages to be as unreliable as a toddler.

Franklin made the same mistake as Microsoft, Google, and other big tech platforms: overhyping something that isn’t ready for use yet in order to gain a marketing advantage. You can’t fault her for her vision. It’s just that she, like many others, implemented it too early. AI is still in its infancy, and humans are still trying to process its implications. There will certainly be “digital employees,” and they will work better than most human employees in the not-too-distant future. We just don’t know when that future will arrive. It’s clearly not happening anytime soon.