34  Digital Employees

Digital Employees are Workspace-scoped AI assistants with dedicated instructions and optional capabilities. Managers configure them in Portal, and Workspace members chat with active employees in Nous.

Digital Employees is currently a Beta product and must be enabled for each Workspace by a Sophea platform administrator.

34.1 Open Digital Employees

For an Organization Workspace in Portal:

  1. Open the Organization.
  2. Select Digital Employees in the account navigation.
  3. Find an active Workspace where the product is Enabled.
  4. Click Open.

You can also open the Workspace card and use the Digital Employees product row. For workspace-only access, open the Workspace under Shared with me and use its Digital Employees link. Controls remain unavailable until Workspace setup finishes and the product is enabled.

In Nous, select Digital Employees from the main navigation to see employees available in the current Workspace.

34.2 Know what each role can do

Role Portal management Nous chat
Organization owner or Organization admin Can manage employees in Organization Workspaces through their effective Workspace authority Can chat with active employees
Workspace admin Can create, edit, activate, deactivate, and delete employees in that Workspace Can chat with active employees
Workspace collaborator Read-only employee view Can chat with active employees

Managing an employee does not grant extra document-search permission. When an employee uses Workspace Search, results are limited by the access of the person using the chat.

Portal shows only employees assigned to Teams that you actively belong to and that have access to the Workspace. This Team boundary also applies to Organization owners and Workspace admins.

Each Digital Employee belongs to one immutable Team. The current management view shows the Team and the inherited knowledge access as read-only. Revoking the Team’s Workspace grant denies the employee access, but does not change its lifecycle. Regranting the Team’s Workspace access restores the employee’s access. Portal blocks Team deletion until every attached Digital Employee is fully deleted.

Portal Digital Employees management table showing two Digital Employees on one Team with their slugs, active and starting states, and management controls

Digital Employee management table in Portal

Access section on the Digital Employee settings page, showing the owning Team and explaining inherited public, Workspace, and private user-file access

Read-only Team access shown while editing a Digital Employee

34.3 Create an employee

On the Workspace’s Digital Employees page in Portal, use Hire a Digital Employee and complete the wizard:

  • Workspace: the wizard opens with a summary of the Workspace you came from. Use Change to pick a different Workspace instead.
  • Team: the one Team that owns the employee’s access. Portal offers only your Teams with access to this Workspace.
  • Role preset: a starting point that pre-fills every setting; you can adjust everything afterward.
  • Display name: the name members see in Nous.
  • Description: a concise explanation of the employee’s purpose.
  • Instructions: the behavior, responsibilities, constraints, and response style the employee should follow.
  • Capabilities: enable only the tools required for the role.

Portal derives the slug automatically from the display name.

New employees show a setup state before they are ready. They appear in Nous after the Workspace change finishes applying.

Portal Hire a Digital Employee wizard on the role step, with team and role preset selectors plus the editable identity, description, instructions, and capability controls

Hire a Digital Employee wizard
Tip

Start with one narrow responsibility. Add capabilities only when the employee’s instructions require them.

34.4 Choose capabilities

Portal currently offers these capabilities:

Capability Purpose
Workspace Search Searches Workspace documents under the current user’s access permissions.
Code Interpreter Runs code for calculations, analysis, and data work.
Agent Service Invokes Workspace-enabled specialist agents for deeper workflows.

Capabilities control which tools the employee may use. Instructions describe when and how it should use them. Enabling a capability does not bypass resource sharing, Workspace access, or another service’s permissions.

34.5 Understand the fixed model policy

Sophea manages the Digital Employee model centrally. Workspace and employee model choices do not change this runtime. This keeps capabilities, image input, reasoning, billing attribution, and support behavior consistent for every employee. Keep role-specific behavior in the employee instructions.

34.6 Activate, pause, edit, or delete

Workspace admins can manage each employee from its Portal row:

  • Pause pauses new chat work without deleting the employee.
  • Resume makes a paused employee available again after the change finishes.
  • Delete removes an employee that is no longer needed.
  • Settings opens the employee’s detail page. Its Edit configuration tab changes the display name, description, instructions, or capabilities. The slug stays fixed after creation.

Changes can briefly place the employee in a setup or updating state. Wait for a ready state before testing it in Nous.

34.7 Manage recurring schedules

A recurring schedule fires a task for the employee on a fixed cadence, for example a digest every weekday morning. Each fired task appears on the employee’s board like any other task.

Create a schedule from the employee’s dashboard in Nous:

  1. Open the employee and switch to the Scheduled segment.
  2. Select New recurring job.
  3. Enter a title and the work to perform, pick a cadence (Every day, Weekdays, Every week, or Every month) and a time, and save.

The dialog notes the detected timezone: schedules always run at that clock time in the creator’s timezone.

Each row shows the cadence and the next run. The cadence label renders in the reader’s own interface language; a schedule saved as a custom cron expression keeps its author-written label instead.

Row actions:

  • Edit changes the title, the work to perform, or the cadence.
  • Disable pauses firing without deleting the schedule. Enable starts it again, and the next run counts from that moment.
  • Delete removes only the schedule. Tasks it already fired stay on the board.

Nous employee dashboard Scheduled segment showing a Weekly stakeholder digest job with its cadence label, next run, and Edit, Disable, and Delete actions

Scheduled segment listing a recurring job with its cadence, next run, and row actions

New recurring job dialog with title, work description, cadence picker, time, and the detected timezone note

New recurring job dialog

34.8 Understand employee status

Nous presents product-language status labels:

Status Meaning
Ready The employee is available for chat.
Starting Setup is still finishing. Wait before sending work.
Paused The employee is inactive and cannot accept new chat work.
Suspended The employee is temporarily unavailable. Ask a Workspace admin to review it.
Needs attention Setup or availability failed. A Workspace admin should review the employee in Portal and contact support if it does not recover.

34.9 Chat with an employee in Nous

  1. Open the correct Workspace in Nous.
  2. Select Digital Employees.
  3. Choose a Ready employee.
  4. Review its description and enabled capabilities.
  5. Enter a request or select a suggested starter prompt.

The dedicated chat shows the response as it is produced and identifies capability activity when the employee uses a tool. If the employee is not ready, the composer explains why it is unavailable.

For Workspace Search, test with a document the current user is allowed to find. A successful result for a Workspace admin does not prove that a Workspace collaborator can retrieve the same private content.

34.10 Review approval requests

An approval request attaches to a completed task and gates its outcome before anyone acts on it. The current release records the decision; automatic enforcement of the outcome follows later.

Request an approval from a completed task’s conversation in Nous:

  1. Open the completed task’s conversation.
  2. Select Request approval.

While a request is pending, watchers of the employee see a Needs your input strip on the employee’s Activity feed in Nous.

Decide in either place:

  • In Nous, open the task’s conversation and choose Approve or Reject, optionally adding a note. The note posts to the task conversation under the decider’s own name.
  • In Portal, open the employee’s Activity tab and use the pending approvals section.

A task carries at most one pending request at a time. Anyone in the Workspace may decide, and the decider is recorded with the decision.

Nous employee Activity feed showing the Needs your input strip for a pending approval with a Review action

Needs your input strip on the employee Activity feed

Portal employee Activity tab showing the pending approvals section with request text, note field, and Approve and Reject buttons

Pending approvals section on the Portal employee Activity tab

34.11 Troubleshoot availability

If Digital Employees is unavailable:

  1. Confirm that the correct Workspace is selected.
  2. In Portal, confirm the Workspace is Active and Digital Employees is Enabled.
  3. Confirm your role. Workspace collaborators can chat but cannot create or change employees.
  4. If an employee is Starting, wait for setup to finish and refresh Nous.
  5. If it is Needs attention or remains unavailable, ask a Workspace admin to review it in Portal and contact Sophea support.

For role and access-source details, see Organizations and Workspace access.