What it is: an AI "employee" is a bot teammate that sits on your Team page right next to your people. Under the hood it's an operator of kind ai with an agent profile — its own instructions, competencies, what it may see, its authority, and its schedule.

Works across channels: you put an employee on a channel — website widget, WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram, or phone (voice) — and it handles those conversations. One employee owns a channel's default; if none is assigned, your account's usual AI answers, exactly as before.

What its instructions are: the employee's text is its role on the line — name, character, task. On accounts that use the "About your business" block, that role sits on top of your business facts and the platform's conversation rules, so putting an employee on a line never loses your addresses, prices or hours. On the classic single-prompt setup the employee's text replaces the prompt entirely; the Team page warns you when that would shrink it.

Where: Team in the menu's Setup group — admins see it there while Digital employees is on. When it is off the menu has no link: open the Team page from this link and switch it on.

How it's enabled: the "Digital employees" master switch at the top of the Team page. New accounts have it ON; you can turn it off. Even when it's on, nothing changes on your live channels until you activate an employee and put it on a channel.

On the Team page you can:

• Hire — pick a role preset (Reception, Sales SDR, Support T1, Follow-up, Reminders, Shift Inspector, or Custom), give it a name, tick its competencies, and choose what it can see and its authority. It's created as a draft — nothing goes live yet.
• "Write the instructions for me" — describe your business in plain language (plus tone and any always / never rules) and it drafts a working system prompt for you to edit. No prompt-writing wall for non-technical owners.
• Activate / Pause — only an Active employee takes live traffic. A draft keeps the lines ticked in its hire form and starts answering on them once you activate it. Pausing takes it off every line it holds, and activating it again does not put it back — put it on its lines again.
• Put on a line / remove — assign the active employee to a whole channel or, if you have several numbers or accounts, to one specific line. A line has exactly one employee; one employee can hold any number of lines. Green chips show where it's live. The hire form has the same checkboxes, so a new employee can take free lines right away — it goes live once activated, and a line a teammate already holds is reassigned from their card.
• Active hours — "Always on" (24/7) or "Mon–Fri 9–18" in your timezone. Outside its shift, your generic AI covers.

How many you can hire. Each plan includes a number of AI employees: the trial, Office and Office + Calls one each, Business two, Pro three, Workforce as many as you need. Every employee you have hired counts — active, paused or still a draft — and a Shift Inspector counts too. When the plan's number is reached, the hire form says so.

Changing an employee after hiring. On the Team page you activate and pause it, set its hours, its lines and who it hands off to. Its name, instructions, competencies, what it can see and its authority are set when you hire it; to change them later, use the API (PATCH /api/v1/employees/{id}).