How an AI employee earns trust in Armada

When you hire a person, you don't hand them the company card on their first morning. They start with small things, someone checks their work, and they get more room as they show they can handle it.

Armada's AI employees work the same way. Nobody switches an employee to "fully autonomous" in a settings page. It earns that, one level at a time, from the work it does for you. This post explains how.

First, probation

Every new hire starts on probation. During probation the employee does the work and proposes what it would do, but nothing it proposes is carried out: no email goes out, no record changes, no money moves. Each proposal is kept so you can read it.

When its proposals have earned your confidence, you graduate it. From then on it acts for real, within its trust level.

Four trust levels

Each employee has a trust score. The score decides its level, and the level decides what it may do without asking anyone.

The point thresholds are defaults. You can change them for your company.

How points are won and lost

Points come from results, not from activity:

• A change it makes on its own that succeeds: +25
• A change a person approved that then succeeds: +20
• A draft a person approves: +15
• A proposal accepted during probation: +10
• A successful read: +2, at most 20 points a day, so an employee can't climb by looking things up

And they go when things go wrong:

• A change that fails: -15
• An approval request a person denies: -10, because asking for the wrong thing costs trust too
• A draft that fails: -5
• A read that fails: -1

If Armada detects something abnormal in how an employee behaves, its score is halved, and it can be held at the lowest level until the hold ends or a person lifts it.

Some actions always ask

A few actions are consequential enough that they wait for a person at every level, Executive included:

• Emailing someone outside the company
• Creating or sending an invoice
• Booking a meeting with someone outside
• Sharing a document outside the company
• Paying or moving money

Your approval rules decide who answers. A rule can match the kind of action, the service, the department and the amount, name the approvers in order, and require two different people. The person who asked for the work can never approve their own request.

Asking doesn't stall the work. The employee asks, moves on to its other work, and the moment the request is approved Armada carries out exactly what was approved, once.

Trust fades when the work stops

Trust is earned continuously, not granted once. An employee that does no work for 7 days starts to lose its score, which halves every 7 days after that. Asking for an approval counts as working, so an employee is never demoted because the people who approve were away or slow to answer.

Routine changes, on its record

At Senior you can let an employee's record approve routine changes for it. This is off unless you turn it on. When it is on, a kind of change (sending email, for example) goes ahead without asking once a person has approved it at least five times in two weeks, with few denials and none among the most recent decisions. The change must also pass a check against your company handbook, and an email must go to someone who has written to you before.

A record never overrides one of your approval rules, and every change approved this way is labelled as such in the record. One denial suspends it until the employee has a clean run again.

What this means for you

You decide how much each employee may do on its own, and you can see why it has the level it has. The levels, the point values, the thresholds and every decision are in the docs and in each employee's record.

Read more in the docs: Trust & autonomy, Employee lifecycle and Approvals.