01Accounts-payable digital employee
Watches the invoice mailbox, reads supplier, amount, GST and purchase order, files by site or department, submits rule-compliant invoices to ApprovalMax and queues the rest for a person by cause. A New Zealand construction head contractor used it to route 730 of 798 invoice documents automatically in one accounting month (91.48%); approval and payment stayed with people.
02Site hours and job-costing digital employee
A foreman posts one sentence or a photo in a Lark group; the digital employee writes the daily record and hours detail, a Base automation applies pay rates into the monthly payroll summary, and the owner reads labour cost by project on a dashboard. A South Island builder went live company-wide in ten weeks with 20 projects and 10,000+ hours in the system.
03Orders and logistics digital employee
Recognises customer orders posted in a WeChat group, splits them, maps SKUs and issues a verification card; once a person says ‘approved’ it creates the SF Express order, archives IDs, writes back the table and pushes the shipping label into the group. A cross-border health-products retailer turned five manual copy steps into one sentence and one confirmation.
04Lead and client follow-up digital employee
Structures enquiries and follow-up notes out of inboxes and chats into a funnel, nudges advisers at lifecycle milestones, hands over a one-page client brief before each meeting and keeps a live dashboard for management. Used for education-group admissions and a mortgage adviser team.
91.48%of 798 invoice documents auto-routed in one accounting month (NZ construction head contractor, project review 1 Sep 2026)
10wksfrom kickoff to company-wide use of site timesheets (South Island builder, 8 Apr to 15 Jun 2026)
11daysfrom kickoff to go-live for a sales reconciliation workflow (financial training firm, 20 to 31 Jul 2026)
90daysfrom kickoff to first production SF Express order (cross-border health retailer, 4 Jun to 2 Sep 2026)
What is an AI digital employee, and how is it different from a chatbot?
An AI digital employee is an AI agent that connects to your existing systems and works through a process continuously: it reads email and group messages, writes results into Xero, ERP or Base tables, and refers anything needing judgment to a person. A chatbot answers questions but does not change data. The value of a digital employee is that the work gets done and recorded.
Do we need to replace systems or install a new app?
No. BEE Sigma’s digital employees live between the tools you already run: email, WeChat, Lark, Teams, Slack, Xero, ApprovalMax, ERP. Workers and sales staff just post one sentence in a group and need no new account. Anything that cannot be connected safely is documented at the assessment stage.
How long does an AI digital employee take to go live?
In our delivered New Zealand cases, invoice routing took three months from connection to the first full accounting-month figure, site timesheets about ten weeks from kickoff to company-wide use, and cross-border ordering about 90 days to the first production order. One sales reconciliation workflow in our records went live in 11 days; follow-up and reconciliation processes are usually planned as a two-to-four-week pilot, and processes with many mapping rules as three months.
What does an AI digital employee cost in New Zealand?
Public New Zealand ranges: a first workflow implementation about NZD 25,000 to 90,000, boutique-studio point tools NZD 500 to 15,000, consultant hourly rates NZD 180 to 450. MBIE’s AI Advisory Pilot can reimburse 50% of eligible advisory costs up to NZD 15,000. BEE Sigma quotes in writing after a free AIV scan or AIM assessment.
Will digital employees replace staff? Who approves and pays?
The digital employees we deliver receive, recognise, file, remind and write back. Approval, payment, pay-rate changes and external commitments stay with people. In delivered cases the change was that a quantity surveyor no longer keys every invoice and foremen no longer fill Excel from memory; people moved to handling what the digital employee cannot decide.
Where does the data live, and can a Chinese-speaking team use it?
A digital employee can run on a Mac mini in your own office, so original invoices and chat records never leave your environment; permissions are isolated by role, so who sees amounts and who sees only their queue is configurable. The BEE Sigma team is bilingual, so New Zealand Chinese businesses and China-based companies work in their own language.