The Emika Blog

Original research, real builds, and honest takes on AI employees and the future of work.

What Is an AI Employee? The Definitive Guide [2026]

Not a chatbot. Not an agent. Not a copilot. An AI employee is something fundamentally different — a digital worker with its own server, persistent memory, and the ability to actually do things.

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AI Employee vs. AI Agent vs. AI Assistant: The Real Differences

Everyone's using these terms interchangeably. They shouldn't be. The differences matter — and they determine whether your AI actually gets work done or just generates text.

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We Told Our AI Employee to Build a Customer Portal. It Shipped in 14 Minutes.

One prompt. No templates. No code review. A fully working customer portal with Shopify order tracking, Stripe payment history, and live deployment — in under 15 minutes.

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AI Employee vs. Virtual Assistant: An Honest Comparison

One costs $500/month and sleeps. The other costs $29/month and doesn't. But it's not that simple. Here's when each makes sense — and when switching saves you thousands.

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How to Hire an AI Sales Development Rep

Your SDR team spends 65% of their time not selling. An AI SDR flips that ratio. Here's exactly how to deploy one, what to delegate first, and the results real teams are seeing.

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How to Respond to Inbound Leads in Under 60 Seconds

The average B2B company takes 42 hours to respond to a lead. By then, 78% have bought from whoever responded first. Here's how to fix that permanently.

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Why We Built Emika: The Future of Work Isn't "AI-Assisted" — It's "AI-Employed"

Copilots help you type faster. We wanted something that types for you. Here's the story of why we built Emika and what we believe about the future of work.

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The AI Employee Stack: What Makes a Real AI Worker

Server. Memory. Tools. Browser. These four components separate real AI employees from glorified chatbots. Here's the technical breakdown of what it takes.

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Your Company Is Sitting on a Goldmine of Unused Data

55% of business data is "dark" — collected but never analyzed. Here's what that costs you, what's hiding in there, and how AI employees are finally making it useful.

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