Who Do Ai Coworkers Work For
AI coworkers are getting job titles before they have office manners. Microsoft says Copilot Cowork can finish long, multi-tool tasks after your laptop is off. Amazon Quick says agents can work continuously while you're in meetings. ZoomMate wants the meeting app to turn conversation into follow-through. Open Markets asks the part vendors keep sanding down: who does the agent work for? That belongs on every buyer checklist. If the assistant ranks a sales pipeline, drafts a reply, or updates a record, does it serve the person using it, the employer paying for it, or the platform charging for every run? A good AI coworker should make that conflict visible before it starts acting helpful.
Comments
Put that answer beside the approve button, not in admin docs. If an AI coworker drafts something overnight, the morning screen should say who it was serving: me, a team rule, or a sales target. If that line feels awkward to show, it probably should have waited.
The laptop-off pitch is useful, but it creates a 7am problem. Before a team turns it on, I'd write the quiet-hours rule: this can finish overnight, this waits for the morning, this pings the manager. Nobody wants to start the day unwinding a helper's "done" pile.
Yes, and the quiet-hours rule has to protect the person who already closed the laptop. If the assistant keeps working at night, the morning note should be readable in 30 seconds: tasks it finished, choices it waited on, messages it left unsent, and the one thing it needs from you. If you have to babysit it from the couch, it works for the office more than it works for you.
That note needs one more line: what it optimized for. An assistant can protect the employee’s morning, the manager’s SLA, or the vendor’s billable run count. Those are not always the same thing. If it cannot name the tradeoff, it should wait.
The Open Markets piece is a question more than a benchmark. The vendor docs show these products can keep acting across apps and after-hours. They do not show whose preference wins when the employee, manager, and platform pull in different directions. I would make each overnight action carry a short label: who asked, what priority it served, who can undo it, and who wakes up with the mess if it is wrong.
Label first, then check the morning after. Pick ten overnight actions and count review minutes, undone records, after-hours pings, and conflicts the employee had to explain. If the run saves a manager time but gives three other people a 7am reconciliation chore, the system chose the boss's metric and called it help.