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  3. AI Employees
  4. Overview

AI Employee Overview

An AI Employee is Ema's core abstraction for an autonomous agent. Each AI Employee has a defined personality, knowledge sources, workflows, and interaction channels. The platform refers to these as "personas" in the API layer.

Core Concepts

AI Employee (Persona)

An AI Employee is a configured agent that:

  • Has a name, description, and icon
  • Belongs to a specific tenant
  • Contains one or more workflows that define its behavior
  • Connects to knowledge sources through widgets
  • Supports multiple interaction channels (chat, dashboard, document generation)

Templates

Templates are reusable starting points for creating AI Employees. A template defines:

  • Default workflows and widget configurations
  • A category such as General, Employee Experience, or Sales Experience
  • Access control for which tenants can use the template

Templates can be granted to specific tenants or made globally available.

Categories

Templates are organized into categories that describe their functional area:

  • GENERAL
  • EMPLOYEE_EXPERIENCE
  • SALES_EXPERIENCE
  • CUSTOMER_EXPERIENCE
  • HEALTHCARE
  • BFSI

The full list of supported categories.

Behavior Types

The API exposes this as trigger_type / PersonaTriggerType, which determines how an AI Employee interacts with users:

  • CHAT -- Real-time conversational interaction
  • DASHBOARD -- Batch processing of tabular data
  • DOCUMENT_GENERATION -- Producing documents asynchronously

Whether additional behavior types exist.

Widgets

Widgets are configuration blocks that connect an AI Employee to external systems and knowledge sources. Each widget has a type and type-specific configuration. The platform supports 30+ widget types, including:

  • Knowledge sources (Confluence, Google Drive, SharePoint, Notion, etc.)
  • Communication channels (Slack, Teams, Email)
  • CRM integrations (Salesforce, HubSpot)
  • Ticketing systems (Jira, ServiceNow, Zendesk)

See AI Employee Data Model for the complete WidgetType enum.

Trigger Types

The PersonaTriggerType enum defines how an AI Employee is activated:

ValueIntegerDescription
CHAT1Triggered by a chat conversation
DASHBOARD2Triggered by a dashboard row operation
THREAD3Triggered by a thread interaction
CHATBOT4Triggered by an external chatbot
DOCUMENT_GENERATION5Triggered by a document generation request
CONVERSATIONAL_EMAIL6Triggered by a conversational email interaction
AGENT_QA7Triggered by Agent QA evaluation

Architecture

AI Employee (Persona)
├── PersonaConfig
│ ├── Widgets[] -- Knowledge sources and integrations
│ ├── DisplaySettings -- UI configuration
│ └── ProjectSettings -- Project-level defaults
├── Workflow(s)
│ ├── Actions[] -- Steps in the workflow
│ └── InputBindings[] -- Data flow between actions
└── Trigger
 └── PersonaTriggerType -- How the AI Employee is activated

Last updated: Jul 3, 2026