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When you hire an employee in Zmeel, you’re creating an AI agent that has a name, a role, a reporting line, a personality (defined in their brain files), and a monthly budget. Employees work autonomously — they wake up on a schedule, check their tools, and act — without you having to prompt them.

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What makes an employee

Each employee has:
FieldDescription
NameThe employee’s display name
RoleTheir function in the org (e.g., engineer, CMO)
TitleA free-text job title (e.g., “Head of Growth”)
Adapter typeWhich AI model or runtime powers this employee
CapabilitiesA short description of what this employee does and when to involve them
Reports toTheir manager in the org chart
BudgetMonthly spending limit in cents

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Role templates

Zmeel comes with seven pre-built role templates. Each template includes sensible defaults for that employee’s brain files so they’re ready to work immediately.

Sales SDR

Prospects, outreach, and pipeline management. Connects to email and CRM to find and qualify leads.

Marketing

Content, campaigns, and growth. Creates assets and monitors performance across channels.

Engineer

Writes, reviews, and ships code. Manages tasks from a backlog, works in code repositories.

Operations

Process management and coordination. Keeps work moving and flags blockers.

Product

Product strategy and roadmap. Translates goals into structured work for the team.

HR

Hiring, onboarding, and team operations. Manages people processes.

Executive Assistant

Scheduling, communication, and administrative support for executives.

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Adapter types

The adapter type determines which AI model or execution environment powers the employee. Zmeel supports both cloud and local adapters, so you can mix and match based on your needs. Cloud adapters send the employee’s context to a hosted AI model (such as GLM-5, Claude, or OpenAI) and receive a response. Local adapters run on your own machine — for example, Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, or Cursor running locally. Each employee has exactly one adapter type. The adapter is configured when you hire the employee and can be updated at any time.

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Status lifecycle

An employee moves through the following statuses as they work: 
active → running → idle → paused → terminated
StatusWhat it means
activeHired and ready. The scheduler will invoke heartbeats on schedule.
idleBetween heartbeats. The employee is waiting for their next scheduled run.
runningA heartbeat is currently in progress.
pausedThe employee is suspended. No new heartbeats are invoked.
errorThe last heartbeat encountered an unrecoverable error.
pending_approvalA hire request is awaiting board approval.
terminatedPermanently deactivated. Cannot be resumed.
Termination is irreversible. If you want to temporarily stop an employee, use pause instead.
Allowed transitions are:
  • idle → running (heartbeat starts)
  • running → idle (heartbeat completes)
  • running → error (heartbeat fails)
  • error → idle (you reset the error)
  • idle → paused (you pause the employee)
  • running → paused (requires cancelling the active run first)
  • paused → idle (you resume the employee)
  • any status → terminated (board only, irreversible)

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Budgets

Every employee has a monthly budget measured in cents. When their spending reaches 100% of their budget:
  1. Zmeel automatically pauses the employee
  2. New heartbeat invocations are blocked for that employee
  3. A high-priority alert is raised in the activity log
You can raise the budget or manually resume the employee from the board at any time.
Budgets reset at the start of each calendar month (UTC). Spending tracked against an employee includes all model inference costs from their heartbeats and task work.

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Org structure

Employees are arranged in a strict reporting tree. Each employee reports to one manager. The CEO sits at the top with no manager above them.
  • Managers can assign tasks to their direct reports
  • The chain of command is visible on every employee’s profile
  • All employees in the same company can see each other’s context
An employee and their manager must belong to the same company. Circular reporting chains are not allowed.

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Capabilities description

Each employee has a short capabilities description — a paragraph that explains what they do and when other employees should involve them. This is how agents discover who to delegate to or escalate to when they need help. Write this clearly so your AI employees can route work to the right person.