> Source: https://builder-docs.ema.ai/api-reference/ai-employees/overview
> Title: AI Employee 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](/legacy-docs/api-reference/ai-employees/data-model) for the complete WidgetType enum.

### Trigger Types

The `PersonaTriggerType` enum defines how an AI Employee is activated:

Value

Integer

Description

`CHAT`

1

Triggered by a chat conversation

`DASHBOARD`

2

Triggered by a dashboard row operation

`THREAD`

3

Triggered by a thread interaction

`CHATBOT`

4

Triggered by an external chatbot

`DOCUMENT_GENERATION`

5

Triggered by a document generation request

`CONVERSATIONAL_EMAIL`

6

Triggered by a conversational email interaction

`AGENT_QA`

7

Triggered 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
```

## Related

-   [AI Employee Data Model](/legacy-docs/api-reference/ai-employees/data-model) -- Full data structures
-   [AI Employee API](/legacy-docs/api-reference/ai-employees/ai-employee-api) -- CRUD endpoints
-   [Template API](/legacy-docs/api-reference/ai-employees/template-api) -- Template management
-   [Workflow Overview](/legacy-docs/api-reference/workflows/overview) -- How workflows power AI Employee behavior