The one-page version
Copilots vs background agents
Both are real, and they do different jobs. A copilot is an assistant: it makes the person using it faster. A background agent is a worker: it does the work whether or not anyone asks. Most enterprises end up needing both — the mistake is expecting one to do the other's job.
| Copilot / assistant | Background agent | |
|---|---|---|
| Starts when | A person prompts it | The work arrives — an invoice lands, a bank feed posts, a deadline nears |
| Helps | One person, one task at a time | The whole queue — matched, posted and reconciled before the team logs in |
| Output | Drafts, answers, summaries a human then acts on | Completed transactions in the system of record, with exceptions escalated |
| Measured by | Usage, adoption and satisfaction surveys | Event logs: cycle time, cost per case, manual touches, rework |
| Governance | The user's judgment on each output | Scoped permissions, confidence thresholds, human review queue, full audit trail |
| Cost profile | Per-seat licences plus tokens on every interaction | Mostly deterministic code; the model is called only where judgment is needed |
| Shows up in | Someone's morning | The close, the exception queue, the P&L |
95%
of enterprise GenAI pilots deliver no measurable return to the P&L MIT NANDA, 2025
7%
of finance leaders who deployed AI report high impact from it Gartner survey of 183 finance leaders
Run both. Expect different things.
Keep the copilots — they're worth having. But if this year's goal is a shorter close and fewer exception hours, that number moves when background agents do the work: inside the systems you already run, governed like employees, and measured in your own event logs rather than a vendor deck.
The low-risk way to test this: one agent, one process, six weeks, fixed price — results re-measured in your own data.
engineer@impira.com.au · impira.com.au