How to Create AI Employees

Over the past year, we’ve seen thousands of business leaders rush to “adopt AI.” They collect prompts, experiment with ChatGPT, and subscribe to a dozen new tools. But here’s the truth: prompt collecting is not an AI strategy.

If your company’s AI efforts start and end with ad-hoc prompt testing, you’re leaving 95% of the potential on the table.

There’s a better way, one that’s scalable, sustainable, and shockingly simple.

It’s time to stop treating AI like a gadget and start treating it like a team member.

From AI Tools to AI Employees

Ryan Deiss, CEO and co-founder of a $200 million holding group managing 17 companies, put it best:

“We don’t need AI tools. We need AI employees.”

When Ryan’s marketing head, Matt, became overloaded, he didn’t hire a new marketer; he cloned him.
Using the Projects feature in ChatGPT and Claude, Ryan trained an AI version of Matt that had access to their best campaigns, customer data, and brand playbooks.

The result?
An AI marketing partner that never sleeps, never forgets, and occasionally writes better-performing copy than Matt himself.

This isn’t science fiction. It’s a repeatable system any company can implement without custom coding or advanced prompt engineering.

Let’s break it down.

The 5-Step System for Building Your AI Team

Step 1: Decide Who to “Hire”

Don’t start with prompts; start with roles.

Ask yourself:

• If I could clone one team member, who would it be?
• Who is the biggest bottleneck in my company?
• What tasks am I constantly doing that someone else should handle?

That’s your first AI hire.

Once you’ve identified the role, open a new Project in ChatGPT or Claude and name it accordingly, for example “AI Head of Marketing” or “AI Sales Assistant.”

Step 2: Write the Job Description

Just like you would for a human employee, write a clear and detailed job description that includes:

• Role & Department: Define their title, team, and reporting line.
• Behavior Guidelines: Set expectations for tone, communication, and decision-making. (For example: “Avoid overusing the em dash, it’s a fireable offense.”)
• Core Responsibilities: Outline recurring tasks and outputs.
• Knowledge & Experience: List frameworks, models, and industry insights they should “know.”
  Remember: Unlike human hires, you can instantly upload this knowledge.
• Output Structure: Explain how deliverables should be formatted and presented.

Add this entire job description to your Project’s Instructions section. This becomes your AI’s “brain,” its foundation for thinking and working within your business.

Step 3: Onboard Your AI Employee

Just like a new hire, your AI employee needs onboarding.

Phase 1: Company Context

Upload everything that defines your business:

• Product and pricing catalogs
• Brand voice and tone guidelines
• Customer personas
• Competitor analysis
• Benchmarks, scorecards, and best practices

Phase 2: Role Training

Then, provide training materials for their specific role:

• Winning examples or case studies
• Swipe files
• Courses, transcripts, or reports relevant to their function

This combination gives your AI the proprietary context it needs to perform at the level of your best team members.

Step 4: Train and Uplevel Continuously

An AI employee, like a human one, gets better the more you train it.

Feed it:

• Winning examples from your latest campaigns
• Updated performance metrics
• Industry reports and transcripts from thought leaders

Each new piece of data refines its understanding and improves its output. The result is a continuously learning team member that gets smarter every week.

Step 5: Scale Across Your Organization

Once your AI employee is performing well, it’s time to scale.

You can:

• Share the Project with other team members
• Turn it into a custom GPT (or Claude instance)
• Or evolve it into a fully autonomous AI agent

Soon, your org chart begins to change, not with fewer humans, but with AI versions of your best people supporting them.
You’ll have an AI Head of Marketing, AI CFO, AI Project Manager, all working alongside their human counterparts.

The Future of Work: Humans + AI Employees

AI doesn’t steal jobs. It steals the boring parts of jobs, the repetitive, time-consuming tasks that have always held people back from their best work.

For CEOs and business leaders, this is the future:
A company where every human manages a team of AI counterparts.

And the setup is easier than you might think. Here’s how to start today:

1. Pick one role you’d like to “hire” as an AI, marketing, finance, operations, etc.
2. Write the job description and paste it into a new Project’s instructions.
3. Upload at least three training files (docs, reports, transcripts, etc.).
4. Assign your AI its first real task.

By tomorrow, you’ll have your first AI employee, one who’s always on time, never forgets instructions, and never asks for a raise.

Final Thoughts

AI isn’t about replacing people. It’s about amplifying them.

Companies that figure out how to embed AI as a teammate, not a toy, will outpace their competitors in efficiency, creativity, and cost-effectiveness.

If you want help building your first AI team, from job description templates to implementation frameworks, our consultants can walk you through the exact process we use with B2B clients every week.

Because the companies that thrive in the next decade won’t just use AI,
They’ll work with it.