How to choose your first AI employee
Start with a recurring responsibility, a concrete output, and a reviewer.
By Kyle Perks · Updated September 4, 2026
Choose a job you can describe
“Help with my business” is hard to evaluate. “Turn my meeting notes into a follow-up email draft” gives the employee a defined input and a useful result. A narrow first role makes mistakes easier to see and improvements easier to measure.
Look for three things
- Repetition: the work comes back often enough to justify a workflow.
- Examples: you can show what a good result looks like.
- Review: someone can judge the output before it matters.
Write a small job description
Describe the task, the information it may use, the output you want, and what it must leave to a person. For a writing assistant, this might mean drafting in your voice while leaving recipients, promises, pricing, and sending decisions to you.
Learn from a pilot
Review representative tasks together. Track where you had to correct facts, tone, or missing context. Expand the role only when its current work is useful and its boundaries are clear.