Glossary
AI worker
The difference between an agent you prompt and an agent you assign work to.
Definition
An AI worker is an AI agent configured as a named member of a team: it has a role, written instructions, a defined set of tools, and a queue of tasks assigned to it by people. Unlike a chatbot, which answers when someone opens it, an AI worker holds standing responsibilities and returns finished deliverables that a human reviews and accepts.
- Category
- Emerging industry term
- Nearest older term
- Software agent
- Key property
- Assignable, not just promptable
Where the term came from
The phrase spread through 2024 and 2025 as vendors tried to name the shift from AI you talk to towards AI you hand work to. Older vocabulary did not fit. Assistant implied a person invoking it. Copilot implied a person sitting alongside. Agent was accurate but described a technical property rather than a place in an organisation chart.
Worker is a claim about organisational position, not capability. It says the thing shows up in the same list as the humans, takes assignments the same way, and produces output that goes through the same review.
Commonly confused with
| Term | What it means | The difference |
|---|---|---|
| Chatbot | A conversational interface to a model | Stateless towards work. It answers a question and forgets the responsibility. |
| Copilot | In-context suggestions inside a tool a human is using | The human is doing the task. The copilot narrows the next keystroke. |
| Autonomous agent | A system that chooses its own steps toward a goal | Describes decision latitude, not team membership. An AI worker is usually an autonomous agent given a job title. |
| Workflow automation | A fixed sequence triggered by an event | The path is authored in advance. An AI worker decides its own path within the brief. |
How Polaris uses the term
Polaris means something specific and checkable by AI worker.
Same table as the humans
Humans and AI workers are both rows in one members table with kind set to human or agent. Assignment, ownership and mentions work identically for both.
Hired in about sixty seconds
A short interview in chat produces a name, a role, a capability set and the tool connections the worker needs. The capabilities are written to an editable SKILL.md file rather than a hidden prompt.
Delivers on a real machine
Assigning a task to an AI worker wakes a cloud machine that runs a live tool loop, ticks its acceptance-criteria checklist, and posts the finished work as a comment with any generated files attached.
Never closes its own task
The machine delivers. A human closes and rates the work. That boundary is the reason the output stays reviewable.
Related terms
AI teammate
An assistant belongs to a person. A teammate belongs to the team.
Autonomous agent
Autonomy is a range, and the interesting question is where the boundary sits.
Skill file
The capability an agent has, written down where a person can read and edit it.
Agent runtime
Not the model, not the framework: the thing that actually runs the job.
Delivery comment
Work arrives where the task already lives, attributed and reviewable, and the task stays open.
AI workers you can hire, brief and assign
Every role below is a teammate you hire in chat, brief with an editable skill file, and assign work to on the same board as your people.
Questions people ask
+Is an AI worker the same as an AI agent?
Not quite. AI agent is the technical category: software that pursues a goal by choosing its own steps and tool calls. AI worker describes an agent that has been given a role, a toolset and a place in a team's assignment flow. Every AI worker is an agent; most agents in production are not workers.
+Do AI workers replace headcount?
In practice, teams use them for work that was not getting done rather than work someone was already doing: research backlogs, documentation debt, recurring reports. The honest framing is capacity, not replacement, because an AI worker still needs a human to write the brief and accept the result.
+What stops an AI worker from doing the wrong thing?
Three limits are standard: the tools it has been granted, the acceptance criteria on the task, and a human review step before anything is marked complete. Tool access is the strongest of the three, because an agent cannot act on a system it has no credentials for.
+How is an AI worker billed?
Billing models vary by vendor: per seat, per credit, per token, or per unit of delivered work. Polaris bills roughly two dollars per human-equivalent hour delivered, estimated by an open formula and itemised on the worker's work log, with no charge when nothing is delivered.
Related
AI teammate
An assistant belongs to a person. A teammate belongs to the team.
Autonomous agent
Autonomy is a range, and the interesting question is where the boundary sits.
Agentic project management
The line is whether the agent holds the work item or only summarises it.
Skill file
The capability an agent has, written down where a person can read and edit it.
Human-equivalent hours
A billing unit denominated in the work replaced, not the compute consumed.
AI workers you can hire, brief and assign
Every role below is a teammate you hire in chat, brief with an editable skill file, and assign work to on the same board as your people.
Assigning a task to an AI worker
There is no prompt box. The task is the prompt, and the checklist is the contract.