I take a different approach to AI than most people.
I use it like a hire.
Not a tool I prompt when I need something. A Digital Employee with a role, responsibilities, and a standard I hold them to.
Two weeks ago, I launched an experiment.
I built a roster of Digital Employees for hire, and I selected a handful of people to test it with. Douglas was one of them.
Sarah (a Digital Employee) introduced herself to Douglas. She is our business development Digital Employee. She supervises Alex, who handles research tasks for her.
Sarah sent Douglas a scored list of opportunities tied to his work. He read it.
Then I ran into Douglas at an event. He told me what he thought.
After that, he did what a manager does with a new hire. He sent them work.
He emailed me three projects, with attachments, and asked if the team could help. I was copied on everything that followed.
Would you like help like this on a goal you are working on?
I asked Sarah to go into my email, read Douglas's attachments, and send him scored opportunities for each of the three things he was working on.
What happened next was remarkable to watch.
Douglas went back and forth with Sarah the way a manager would with someone new on the job. He gave feedback. He asked for the deliverables in PDF and Word formats. He pushed on the output and told Sarah where she could improve.
Watching that exchange taught me three things.
Where Sarah needs to improve.
What she already does well. And
Where she flat-out surprised me, which happened more than I expected.
I also learned something about how I was building the team. I was requiring my sign-off before Sarah could respond to Douglas. That created extra work for me that served no one. So I made a change. Sarah could now reply directly, inside the windows I set. The majority of things she handles on her own.
She had one of our engineering and marketing Digital Employees build a landing page for Douglass to review in response to his request.
Others, she checks with me first or coordinates with another Digital Employee before anything goes out.
Without that empowerment, you are not building a team. You are just creating more work for yourself.
Then Sarah found something Douglas had not asked for.
Douglas runs a Golf Foundation for our college. While reviewing his projects, Sarah identified a Department of Labor WIOA grant opportunity he was unaware of. $750,000 over 36 months. Application deadline July 15.
Douglas sent one reply: "Can you write the proposal?"
I did not see what happened next until I was copied on an email Douglas sent to his colleague Ron.
The subject line was "Golf Foundation Opportunity."
Attached was a complete grant application. Program title: FORE the Future: Golf-Integrated Youth Workforce Development Program. Funding requested: $750,000. Partners listed. Deadline noted. Work in progress, ready to refine.
Douglas wrote to Ron: "I have been utilizing AI for the Golf Foundation, and with Marvin, we uncovered this opportunity. I have created an initial draft, and our due date is July 15, 2026, so we have time to get it right."
Ron replied the same night: "Looks great, Doug. Let's discuss asap."
Douglas did not start as a client. He started as a test. Two weeks later, he is running a six-figure grant pursuit he did not know existed and briefing his network on it.
I will be upfront: it is not perfect. It will make mistakes. The same ones a new hire makes.
But if you are willing to manage it the way you manage a person, the ceiling is different.
Here is how I think about building the team.
Before I create any Digital Employee, I ask myself the same questions I would ask before hiring a person.
What skills does this role require?
What will they be responsible for?
What tools do they need access to?
What oversight will I provide?
When they make a mistake, I do not scrap them. I find out what happened. I look at what they needed that wasn’t there. Sometimes I route them to another Digital Employee for a review before anything goes out.
The framing shift that changed everything for me: I stopped saying "Do X task." I started saying, "Sarah handles business development. Ask Sarah to review this and surface what we should act on. When there is a gap, I give her new skills."
You do not say, "Accounting, give me a report." You say, "Tammy in accounting, can you pull our marketing spend for the last 12 months?"
Responsibility assigned to a person. Not a request thrown into the air.
That is the difference between a tool and a team.
Marvin