AI Employee Glossary
Key concepts behind VEP's cognitive AI workforce architecture.
AI Employee
An autonomous AI worker that can reason, remember, and act within a company. Unlike chatbots (reactive, stateless) or agents (task-oriented, temporary), AI employees have permanent memory, graduated authority, and ongoing employment within an organization.
Cognitive Architecture
VEP's multi-layered decision system modeled on neuroscience. Includes neocortex (deep reasoning), limbic router (context-aware routing), hippocampus (memory formation), and amygdala (salience detection). This is what separates AI employees from simple prompt→response bots.
DNA Knowledge System
VEP's permanent memory layer. Every interaction, preference, and insight an AI employee encounters is stored as a "DNA fact" that persists forever. Unlike RAG (retrieval at query time), DNA is living knowledge that grows and evolves.
Epistemic Integrity
An AI employee's ability to know what it doesn't know. When confidence is low, VEP employees escalate to humans instead of guessing. This prevents hallucination-driven decisions in business contexts.
Graduated Authority
A permission system where AI employees start with limited autonomy and earn more as they prove reliable. Combined with circuit breakers that auto-pause when anomalies are detected.
Circuit Breaker
Automatic safety mechanism that pauses an AI employee when it detects repeated failures, constraint violations, or runaway cost patterns. Requires human approval to resume. Prevents expensive loops.
Boss Chat
Natural language interface for managing AI employees. Instead of dashboards and configuration screens, you text your AI employee like a real team member. Give tasks, ask questions, provide feedback.
Goal Contract
A measurable success criterion every AI employee task must declare before execution: intended metric, baseline value, target value, and artifact type. Goals without contracts are rejected — preventing unmeasurable busywork.
Value Health Score
Weekly per-employee metric (0-100) measuring: task success rate, downstream consumption of artifacts, cost efficiency, and attributed metric movement. Red-flagged employees are escalated to the boss.
Soft Scoring
When hard constraints reject all items, VEP's soft scorer computes partial match scores (0-1) and rescues items above threshold (default 0.6). Prevents all-or-nothing filtering that leads to infinite loops.