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AI Workforce · Built for small teams

Hire your first AI workforce. No engineers, no implementation, no enterprise contract.

DeskFerry gives you AI employees you can hire today — an AI SDR, an AI invoicing clerk, an AI support rep — bundled into departments that already work together. Pick a department, connect your tools, and the workforce starts shipping work in an afternoon.

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Set up in an afternoon · Works with 1,500+ apps you already use

The shift

What is an AI workforce, really?

An AI workforce is a team of specialized AI employees working inside your company — each with a clear role, the tools it needs, and a KPI it's measured against. One owns outbound sales. One reconciles invoices. One handles the first response on every support ticket. They run all day, every day, and they share context the way a real team would: a lead the AI SDR books gets logged in your CRM by the AI updater, surfaced in tomorrow's briefing by the AI ops analyst, and reflected in the support agent's memory the moment that customer writes in.

For the last decade, "automation" meant scripting the steps yourself. Zapier, Make, n8n — all powerful, all useless the moment reality drifts from the path you mapped. An AI workforce flips this: you hand each employee a goal, not a flowchart. The AI reads context, picks the right tool, asks for help when stuck, and adapts when the input is messy. The unit of work moves from workflow to role.

The shift matters most for small teams. Hiring a human SDR, a human bookkeeper, and a human support rep is the slowest, most expensive way to grow a company. An AI workforce gives a five-person team the operational leverage of a fifty-person one — without the recruiting, the onboarding, the management overhead, or the runway burn. You hire the role you'd hire next, you hire it this afternoon, and it's in production by Monday.

DeskFerry Departments

Departments, not just agents.

Most platforms sell you a single agent and leave the team-building to you. DeskFerry ships ready-made AI departments — bundled roles that already know how to hand off to each other, share context, and report up.

AI Sales Department

Find pipeline, qualify it, hand off ready-to-close meetings.

AI SDR

KPI

Outbound + inbound reply

GmailHubSpotLinkedIn

Measured by: Meetings booked / week

AI Researcher

KPI

Account & contact intel

ApolloCrunchbaseWeb

Measured by: Enriched accounts / day

AI CRM Updater

KPI

Logs activity & updates stages

HubSpotSalesforceSlack

Measured by: % deals with clean data

AI Operations Department

Keep the back office running while the team is in customer mode.

AI Invoicing Clerk

KPI

Reconciles & chases invoices

QuickBooksStripeGmail

Measured by: Days sales outstanding

AI Inbox Triage

KPI

Sorts, drafts, routes shared inbox

GmailOutlookSlack

Measured by: First-response time

AI Reporting Analyst

KPI

Daily metric digest

NotionSlackGA4

Measured by: Reports delivered on time

AI Support Department

Answer customers the moment they ask, escalate only when needed.

AI Tier-1 Responder

KPI

Replies to common tickets

ZendeskIntercomDocs

Measured by: % tickets auto-resolved

AI Escalation Router

KPI

Hands off w/ full context

SlackLinearZendesk

Measured by: Time to right human

AI Knowledge Updater

KPI

Updates docs from real tickets

NotionIntercomGitHub

Measured by: Articles refreshed / week

Every employee has the same anatomy: a role, the tools to do it, and a KPI you can see. No prompt-engineering needed — you hire the role, you don't build it.

Automation vs AI employee

Where automation stops,
an AI employee starts.

Automation runs the exact path you defined. An AI employee is given a goal, picks the tools, handles the edge cases, and asks for help when it's stuck — like a teammate would.

DimensionAutomation / workflowDeskFerry employee
Unit of workA defined workflow (when X, do Y)A goal you'd give a new hire
JudgmentFollows the script; fails on edge casesReads context and adapts in real time
ToolsPre-wired actions you connectedPicks the right tool for the moment
MemoryStateless between runsRemembers people, accounts, history
When stuckSilently errors or stopsEscalates to a teammate with context
ReportingLogs of run/failedKPI you can manage against

Keep your zaps for the deterministic stuff — "new Stripe charge → row in Sheets" will always be a workflow. Use an AI workforce for the judgment-heavy work: outbound replies, ticket triage, inbox sorting, exception handling, follow-ups. The work that used to need a person.

Build your own department

Compose the workforce you'd hire next.

Pick a template to start, then toggle the AI employees you want in your department. No commitment — every choice is reversible after you start.

Sales

Operations

Support

Three departments, fleshed out

What each AI department actually ships.

Each department is three coordinated AI employees with their own roles, tools, and KPIs. Here's exactly what they do, day one.

AI Sales Department

An always-on outbound team.

The AI Sales Department finds the right accounts, opens the conversation, qualifies inbound replies, and lands meetings on your calendar — while your CRM stays clean automatically. Built for founders selling without a sales team and for small revenue teams that need 10x the throughput without 10x the headcount.

AI SDR

Owns outbound sequences and inbound first replies

Tools: Gmail / Outlook, HubSpot, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Slack

KPI: Qualified meetings booked per week

A day in the rolePulls a target account list, drafts a personalized opener, sends from your inbox, handles the back-and-forth, and books the meeting on your calendar.

AI Researcher

Builds account & contact intel before every send

Tools: Apollo, Crunchbase, LinkedIn, company website, news

KPI: Enriched accounts and talking points per day

A day in the roleFor every account, reads the site, finds the right buyer, pulls recent news or funding events, and writes a 2-line talking point the SDR uses to personalize.

AI CRM Updater

Keeps every record clean without nagging the team

Tools: HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Gmail, calendar

KPI: Percentage of deals with complete data at each stage

A day in the roleWatches inbox + calendar + Slack, logs activities, updates deal stages, fills missing fields, and pings the rep only when human judgment is genuinely needed.

AI Operations Department

The back office that runs itself.

The AI Operations Department handles the unglamorous work that drains a small team — invoicing, inbox triage, reporting — so the humans can stay on the customer-facing work that actually moves the company forward.

AI Invoicing Clerk

Sends invoices, reconciles payments, chases what's late

Tools: QuickBooks, Xero, Stripe, Gmail, Slack

KPI: Days sales outstanding (DSO)

A day in the roleDrafts invoices from completed milestones, matches incoming payments, and runs a polite collection sequence on overdue accounts — escalating to a human only before final action.

AI Inbox Triage

Sorts shared inboxes, drafts replies, routes the rest

Tools: Gmail, Outlook, Slack, support inbox

KPI: First-response time on inbound mail

A day in the roleReads every new message, classifies it (lead / billing / support / vendor / spam), drafts a reply where appropriate, and routes anything that needs a human to the right teammate with full context.

AI Reporting Analyst

Builds and delivers the metrics digest, daily

Tools: Notion, Slack, GA4, Stripe, HubSpot, your warehouse

KPI: On-time reporting and decisions made from each report

A day in the roleEach morning, pulls revenue, pipeline, support load, and product metrics, writes a 5-bullet digest with last week's delta, posts to Slack, and flags anomalies for the founder.

AI Support Department

Hours-to-minutes first response, without hiring.

The AI Support Department answers customers the moment they write in, escalates the hard ones with full context, and quietly rewrites your help docs from what real customers ask. It's the difference between a 12-hour response time and a 2-minute one — without hiring a support rep.

AI Tier-1 Responder

Resolves common questions end-to-end

Tools: Zendesk, Intercom, Help Scout, your help docs, product data

KPI: Percentage of tickets auto-resolved with positive CSAT

A day in the roleReads the ticket, finds the answer in docs and live product data, replies in your tone, and closes the loop — flagging any reply that customers rated negatively for review.

AI Escalation Router

Hands tough tickets to the right human, with context

Tools: Slack, Linear, Zendesk, Intercom

KPI: Time-to-right-human on escalated tickets

A day in the roleWhen a ticket needs a human, classifies it (billing / bug / enterprise / churn-risk), pings the right teammate in Slack with the full conversation summarized, and opens a Linear issue if it's a bug.

AI Knowledge Updater

Turns real tickets into better docs, every week

Tools: Notion, your help center, Intercom, GitHub

KPI: Help articles refreshed or added per week

A day in the roleReads the week's tickets, finds the questions docs failed to answer, drafts updates, opens a PR or a Notion draft, and asks the team for one-click approval.

Pricing

Pay per AI employee, like you would a real one.

Hire one AI employee or a full department. Pricing scales with the size of the workforce you hire — not with seats, not with workflow runs, not with engineering retainers. No implementation fees, no annual minimums, no enterprise contract.

See pricingGet Started

Frequently asked

What founders ask before hiring their first AI employee.

An AI workforce is a team of specialized AI employees working together inside one company, the way a human team would. Each AI employee owns a role, uses its own set of tools, and is measured against a KPI — instead of one generalist agent trying to do everything. A single AI agent might answer a question or run a workflow; an AI workforce runs an entire function. Your AI Sales Department has an SDR, a researcher, and a CRM updater. They share context, hand off work, and report up to you. The shift from 'one agent' to 'a workforce' is the difference between hiring a freelancer and hiring a team.

No. DeskFerry is built so a non-technical founder or operator can hire their first AI employee in an afternoon. You pick a department template (Sales, Ops, Support, or custom), choose the agents you want, connect the tools they need with one-click OAuth, and start delegating in plain English. There is no code to write, no engineering retainer, no six-month rollout. Enterprise-grade AI agent platforms typically require a solutions team, a dedicated PM, and a quarter of integration work before anything ships — we deliberately built away from that, for small teams who need the workforce running this week.

Automation runs the exact path you defined: when X happens, do Y. An AI employee is given a goal and decides how to get there — it reads context, picks the right tool, asks for help when stuck, and adapts when the situation is messy. A Zapier zap that 'replies to inbound leads' fails the moment a lead asks an unexpected question. An AI SDR reads the lead's site, finds the right talking point, drafts a tailored reply, books the meeting, and updates the CRM — without you defining every branch. Automation handles known steps; an AI workforce handles judgment-heavy work end-to-end.

Yes. Every AI employee connects to the tools you already pay for — HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Zendesk, Intercom, Gmail, Outlook, Slack, Stripe, QuickBooks, Notion, Linear, and 1,500+ more — through native one-click OAuth. No API keys, no webhooks, no middleware. You stay on your stack; the AI workforce learns it. If a tool isn't in the library but has a public API, you can add it as a custom connector. New integrations ship every week based on what customers ask for.

Pricing is per AI employee per month, not per seat or per workflow run, so the cost scales with the size of the workforce you hire — not with how much your team uses it. Most small teams start with one or two employees in a single department (often Sales or Support) and grow from there as the ROI compounds. There is no implementation fee, no annual contract minimum, and no setup retainer. See full pricing and tiers on the pricing page.

Every AI employee has an escalation policy you control. For low-stakes, reversible actions, it just acts and logs the result. For destructive or external-facing actions — sending to a customer, moving money, deleting records — it pauses and asks a human to approve. When it genuinely doesn't know what to do (an edge case, a missing tool, ambiguous input), it routes the task to a teammate in Slack or email with full context attached. Every run is logged with the data it read, the steps it took, and the outcome — so you can audit, replay, or coach the employee just like you would a new hire.