How an AI Employee Duty Gets Written, Delegated, and Managed
One duty, end to end: the one-page card, the plain-English playbook, the ninety-day ramp from shadow to unattended, and the weekly run report you read instead.
A duty is the unit of work an AI Employee takes on. Not a project, not a chatbot conversation, not "AI for the business." One recurring job, written down, handed over, and reported on every week. Here is one, end to end, so you can see what you would actually be delegating.
What makes something a duty
Not every loop qualifies. The ones that do have three things in common. They come around on a schedule or on a trigger. They have a known-correct answer, so "done" can be written down. And they only need someone reliable to do the same thing the same way. Pricing a big proposal fails the second test. Chasing an overdue invoice passes all three.
Written
Every duty starts as a card. One page, plain English, the same eight lines every time. Here is the card for the duty most owners hand over first.
| Line | Receivables follow-up |
|---|---|
| Duty | Remind clients about invoices that are past due, in our voice, on our schedule. |
| Trigger | Every weekday morning at 7:00. |
| Inputs | Open invoices in the accounting system; the client contact on each; the last reminder sent. |
| Output | A reminder email per overdue invoice, escalating in tone at 7, 14, and 30 days. |
| Definition of done | Every invoice past due has exactly one reminder in the right tier. Zero matches or an invoice with no contact gets flagged, never guessed. |
| Safe to re-run | A reminder already sent today is never sent twice; the ledger keeps the record. |
| Autonomy at ship | Shadow, then draft, then unattended. |
| Reports to | The owner. |
Behind the card sits the playbook: the step-by-step procedure, the reminder wording for each tier, the exceptions ("never remind this client during their audit month"), and what to do when something does not match. It is written in English, not code, and you keep it. When a rule changes, the sentence changes, and the next run follows the new sentence.
"An invoice is overdue when today is past the due date and the balance is not zero. Find the primary contact on the account. If there is no primary contact, do not send anything; add the invoice to the report under Needs a human. Use the 7-day wording for the first reminder, the 14-day wording for the second, and the 30-day wording for the third. After the third, stop and flag it for the owner."
Delegated
Handing the duty over is not a switch. It is a ninety-day ramp, and each stage has to earn the next one.
- Shadow. The employee runs the duty and writes what it would have done. You keep doing the work. You compare the two. This is where the playbook gets corrected, because the first draft of any procedure is missing something.
- Draft. The employee does the work up to the last step and stops. The reminders sit in your outbox as drafts; you approve and send. Now it is doing the job and you are checking it.
- Unattended. The employee runs the duty and sends. You read the run report. If it hits something the playbook did not anticipate, it stops on that item and tells you, rather than making something up.
The first duty typically runs within thirty days and reaches unattended by day ninety. Some duties never leave draft, on purpose. A month-end package that goes to your lender is one you will probably want to approve every time, and that is a perfectly good place for a duty to live.
The Playbook stays alive because something actually runs it.
Eric Lovgren, lovgren.ai
Managed
An employee that reports to nobody is a liability. Every run produces a report, and once a week you get the summary. It is written to be read in five minutes and it always has the same four parts.
| Part | What it says | This week, for example |
|---|---|---|
| What ran | Each duty, each run, on time or not | Receivables follow-up ran 5 of 5 weekday mornings |
| What it found | The facts it worked from | 11 invoices past due, 3 of them past 30 days |
| What it did | The actions taken, with a link to each | 8 reminders sent, 4 at the 7-day tier, 3 at 14, 1 at 30 |
| Needs a human | Anything it stopped on | 2 invoices with no primary contact; 1 client past the third reminder |
The last part is the one that matters. It is the loop you are still in, and it is a short one. You answer three questions instead of chasing eleven invoices, and the answers go back into the playbook so the same question does not come up next month.
That is what managing an AI Employee means in practice: reading the report, making the corrections, and reviewing the duty against its card every quarter the way you would with anyone on your team. We do that work as the employee's manager. Every month of run reports is another month of track record, and the track record is what makes the employee an asset a buyer or a lender can read, rather than a project someone once did.
The guardrails
The rules the employee runs under are the same ones you would give a careful new hire in the first week, written down so they hold.
It reads before it writes. It drafts before it sends, until the duty has earned unattended. It never deletes. When something does not match the playbook, it stops and reports rather than improvising. And it works under its own named login in your systems, so every action is attributed to the employee, not to a person, and the audit trail is clean.
Ours was the Monday pipeline brief. Every week the employee reads our CRM, read-only, and writes the summary we used to assemble by hand before we could think. Next in line is billing, because it has a calendar attached and it is the money loop: when a client approves a timesheet, an email arrives, the employee finds the one matching draft invoice, and marks it sent with the approval date. Exactly one match or it flags it. Neither duty is glamorous, and that is the point. The duties that free your week are rarely the interesting ones.
Your first five will differ. Finding them is what discovery is for, and what the employee is in the first place is on How It Works.
Which duty would you write first?
Thirty minutes, no preparation. We'll talk about your business and what you want from it. By the end you'll know whether it's a fit, and how soon your business could be running without you in every loop.
No Pitch. Just Possibilities.