An AI coworker is an AI system that works alongside a team inside the tools the team already uses - Slack or Microsoft Teams, the inbox, the tracker, the docs - rather than in a separate tab. It connects to those tools under the team's existing permissions, takes on whole recurring jobs such as reporting, follow-ups and status updates, and drafts the work for a human to approve before anything goes out. Three traits define the category: it shares the team's tools, it does jobs rather than just answering questions, and a person stays in the loop on every outbound action.
The term exists because the older words all describe something narrower. A chatbot answers when asked. A copilot helps one person inside one app. An agent can act toward a goal, but the word says nothing about where it works or who approves the result. "Coworker" names the combination teams actually want: agent-grade capability, embedded in the team's own channels, with human judgement kept on everything that leaves the building.
