What is the morning brief?
The morning brief is the daily report a Digital FTE writes to its manager, in the first person, at the start of each working day. It is the Today tab of the workspace, and it is designed to be read in about five minutes: what needs the manager's decision, what was done, what changed, and what it cost.
It is written by the FTE about its own work, the way a direct report might send a short morning note. That framing is deliberate: the manager is reviewing a worker, not reading a dashboard.
Why does waiting on you come first?
Waiting on you comes first because those items block the work. A proposal that has not been approved does not happen; an escalation that has not been decided leaves a customer or a ledger line waiting. Putting them first means the manager's five minutes go to the decisions that unblock the day.
Each waiting item carries its evidence, so the decision is fast: a proposed match with the documents attached, a draft with its fact-gate result, an escalation with its summary and suggested next step. The count of waiting items also appears in the workspace header, so it is never hidden.
What does yesterday contain?
Yesterday contains what the Digital FTE did against its targets: transactions reconciled, tickets resolved at first line, pages drafted or published, candidates screened, outreach proposed. It states misses plainly, such as a target not progressed because a connection failed or a category paused after a send-back, with the reason.
It does not pad. A quiet day is reported as a quiet day. The value of the brief depends on the manager trusting that what it says is what happened, and that trust is built by never inflating.
- Waiting on you: proposals and escalations with evidence
- Yesterday: work done against targets, misses with reasons
- Detections: anomalies, changes, opportunities, risks
- Spend: tokens against budget, external spend where applicable
What are detections?
Detections are things the Digital FTE noticed that the manager may want to act on: a duplicate payment pattern, a competitor's page that started outranking yours, a spike in one ticket category, a candidate source that dried up, a risk signal from a market-entry plan moving. Each comes with the evidence and, where appropriate, a proposed response for approval.
Detections are how the FTE earns its place as a colleague rather than a tool. A tool does what it is told; a colleague tells you what they saw.
Why is spend always in the brief?
Spend is always in the brief because a manager should never be surprised by cost. Tokens consumed against the FTE's budget, mission spend against the mission budget, and external platform spend such as ads against its own budget are shown every day, with a warning as any limit approaches.
This is the daily face of the spend governance model on ftes.ai: one wallet, per-FTE budgets, a hard stop, and visibility. The brief is where the visibility lives, and it is the reason the hard stop is rarely reached.
What does a labelled example of a brief look like?
As a labelled example for a Finance Controller Digital FTE on an ordinary morning: waiting on you lists three proposed matches with their bank lines and invoices attached, two exceptions with the reason each could not be matched and the documents, and one anomaly flagged as a possible duplicate payment with both transactions shown. Yesterday reports the number of transactions reconciled against the daily target, the exact matches auto-approved under the promoted class, and one target not progressed because a bank feed connection failed overnight, with the reconnection needed.
Detections notes that a supplier's invoice numbering changed format, which the FTE will treat as a new pattern until confirmed, and asks whether it should. Spend shows tokens consumed against the month's budget with the proportion of the month elapsed beside it, and no warning. The whole brief reads in under five minutes, the manager's decisions are the first block, and every item links to the evidence behind it. A quiet day reads shorter; a bad day reads longer at the top, which is where a bad day should be.