# Chapter 2. What Is an AI Worker? (/ai-worker-paradigm/what-is-an-ai-worker/overview)

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title: "Chapter 2. What Is an AI Worker?"
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## The point

After this chapter you can split an **AI Worker** into the sixteen elements that define it. You can tell the difference between an AI Worker and a model, an assistant, an automation and an agent. You can separate the worker from the runtime that executes it, and from the channel where people reach it. You can choose a surface and a model for a piece of work on either leading AI vendor. And you can write the first draft of a **Role Contract**, the one-page definition that the rest of the book builds on.

## Why it matters

After Chapter 1, Brightline's controller, Dave, who runs its accounting, set up what everyone now calls "the AP (accounts payable) assistant." He made a shared project in the team's AI app and uploaded the AP policy. He connected the AP inbox, and he added a weekly task that builds the invoice register every Monday.

Three weeks later, a clerk asked the assistant to "handle this morning's vendor emails." One email seemed to come from one of Brightline's usual shipping vendors. It asked Brightline to send Friday's payment to a new bank account. The assistant drafted a friendly reply confirming the change, and it updated the bank details in the register. The clerk was about to send the reply. Maria, the office manager, stopped it, because the new bank was in a US state the vendor had never used. The email was fake.

At the review, Dave asked four plain questions. Who owns this assistant? What may it do on its own? When must it stop and ask a person? How do we know whether it is doing a good job? Nobody could answer. The weekly task ran under Dave's own login, and he had been on vacation the week before. The policy file was a copy from March, two versions out of date. And three people described "the assistant" three ways: Dave meant the project, Maria meant the chat window, and IT meant the scheduled task.

The model was capable. The tools worked. What was missing was a definition of the worker: its job, its limits, its owner and how to judge it. This chapter gives that definition.