What is the never-automated list?
The never-automated list is the set of actions a Digital FTE on ftes.ai cannot take on its own under any circumstances: not at Level 3 on the autonomy ladder, not under any remit, not by any setting a manager can change. The FTE can prepare these actions, drafting a message, assembling the evidence, suggesting a decision, but a named person performs them, and the audit trail records who.
It is a design commitment rather than a configuration, which is what distinguishes it from the always-escalate list a manager writes per role.
What is on it?
Decisions that change a person's employment outcome: rejecting or offering a candidate, setting pay, rating performance, taking disciplinary action, and handling grievances. Their equivalents in money and contracts: escalating a debt to collections, issuing or refusing refunds beyond a remit's bounds, setting prices, discounts, and contract terms. And anything involving a person's health, family, or protected characteristics.
The common thread is asymmetry and accountability. These decisions have consequences that fall on a person, and the person who makes them must be able to answer for them; software cannot.
- Rejections, offers, pay, performance, discipline, grievances
- Debt escalation, refunds beyond bounds, pricing, discounts, terms
- Anything about health, family, or protected characteristics
How does it work in practice?
In practice the Digital FTE stops at the preparation step. A Recruiter FTE ranks a shortlist with evidence and drafts the communication, and the hiring manager decides who to interview and who to reject, sends the messages or approves them to be sent, and is named in the trail. A Finance Controller FTE flags an overdue invoice and prepares the dispute package, and the person who owns the relationship decides whether to escalate.
The autonomy ladder's promotion controls simply do not offer these classes. A manager looking in Setup for a way to auto-send rejections will not find one, which is the point.
Why is it fixed by the platform rather than by the customer?
It is fixed by the platform because a governance floor that any administrator can lower under pressure is not a floor. The list exists so that a manager in a hurry, a team short of time, or an organization tempted by a quiet quarter cannot automate a decision whose consequences fall on a person, and so that every organization on the platform can say the same thing to a regulator or a candidate.
It is also what makes the accountability model whole. For gated actions the approver is accountable; for promoted classes the grantor is; for the never-automated list, the person who acts is, exactly as before the FTE was hired.
What is it often confused with?
It is confused with the always-escalate list, which a manager sets per role and which covers categories the organization chooses to keep human, such as complaints or distress in support. The two overlap in effect but differ in origin: one is a design commitment, the other a remit decision. It is also confused with Level 0 on the autonomy ladder, which gates everything at the start; Level 0 is a starting point that classes climb away from, while the never-automated list is a ceiling no class reaches.
It is occasionally read as a limitation. It is a promise, and a vendor evaluation should ask every vendor for their equivalent and treat its absence as a finding.
Where do you see it?
It is stated in the platform's design and visible by absence in Setup: the classes of action available for promotion never include the listed actions. The audit trail shows every such action performed by a named person. The buyer's guide and the security checklist in the ftes.ai library both ask for it as a first-order check.
Related terms: always-escalate list, autonomy ladder, accountability, approval gate, audit trail.
For a manager the practical consequence is simple: when a Digital FTE's proposal arrives with a suggested decision about a candidate, a debt, or a price, the suggestion is the FTE doing its preparatory job, and the decision that follows is theirs, made from the evidence attached, and recorded under their name.