“Today Lattice is making AI history,” CEO Sarah Franklin wrote in a July 9th blog post. “We will be the first to give digital workers official employee records in Lattice. Digital workers will be securely onboarded, trained, and assigned goals, performance metrics, appropriate systems access, and even a manager. Just as any person would be.” On July 12th, after a very predictable backlash, Lattice posted an update saying it “will not further pursue digital workers in the product.
* “This strategy and messaging misses the mark in a big way, and I say that as someone building an AI company,” said Sawyer Middeleer, chief of staff at Aomni, in a comment to a post from Franklin on LinkedIn. Franklin’s original post did acknowledge that there are questions about what it means to integrate an AI worker into processes for managing real people. And Franklin has posted comments on LinkedIn to explain Lattice’s thinking about the feature.