I'm building a Digital Me. I'm not sure HR is ready for her.

Six months ago, I wrote for UNLEASH about Digital Me, and what happens when AI starts capturing not just the work we produce but some of the capability behind it. Since then I've done the entirely sensible thing of volunteering as the experiment. Digital Cheney is now being built.

There's a serious research reason. Through the category FusionWork™ at Bloor Research I've spent years studying human and digital capability, and Human Digital Twins are increasingly part of that work.

There's also a rather less dignified one. I'm 45, perimenopausal, and my brain has annoyingly rolled out an innovative new knowledge-management system, whereby information remains available but is retrieved strictly according to a timetable known only to itself. I can recall song lyrics from 1994 with forensic accuracy, and talk for hours about workforce architecture and AI. I cannot, however, reliably produce the name of the person I met last Tuesday until roughly 3:17 the following morning.

What menopause has made obvious is that having capability and being able to retrieve it on demand are not the same thing. Somewhere between researching Human Digital Twins and standing in the kitchen wondering why I'd walked in, my view of AI shifted.

I don't need AI to replace me. I need it to help me remember me.

Which is where HR comes in. If a Digital Me can capture and carry a person's accumulated capability, then almost everything HR currently manages starts to sit on shifting ground: job design, reward, knowledge retention, even what offboarding means. Which is where HR comes in. If a Digital Me can capture and carry a person's accumulated capability, then almost everything HR currently manages starts to sit on shifting ground: job design, reward, knowledge retention, even what offboarding means.

This isn't a technology story. It's an employment relationship story, and HR will either shape it or inherit it.

We need to get clearer about what a Digital Me actually is

We use similar language for very different things. A digital human that looks and sounds like me isn't necessarily Digital Cheney; honestly, cloning my voice is one of the least interesting things you could do with it.

The real progression runs from Representation to Memory to Cognition and, eventually, Agency: from copying how I sound to grasping how I reason, and one day doing certain governed things as me.

Those distinctions matter, and they are why I'm going deeper with Allied Worldwide.

Digital Cheney belongs to Cheney. Simple…except it isn't.

Allied's proposition interests me because it draws a deliberate line between an individually owned DigitalMe℠ and an organization-owned Enterprise Digital Twin.

In their model my Digital Me belongs to me. An employer can have agreed access to the relevant capability, but Digital Cheney doesn't become part of the office furniture the moment I leave.

I like that principle. It also falls apart the second you poke it: most of the evidence of how we develop professionally isn't anywhere we control. It's scattered across the systems of every organization we've ever worked for.

Think about how judgement is actually formed. It's the decision that went catastrophically wrong in 2013 and permanently changed how you assess risk. And the evidence of that hard-won evolution is everywhere: emails, Teams, SharePoint, the CRM, three old laptops and, in my case, an indefensible number of documents named things like FINAL_v7_ACTUALFINAL_USETHISONE2.docx. (There is, inevitably, a v8.)

That isn't knowledge management. That's a cry for help.

So perhaps the real problem isn't whether I can take Digital Cheney with me when I leave, but that I've never had any way of accumulating myself in the first place.

Nobody sits you down at 25 and suggests keeping a portable record of your evolving judgement. Had they, by 45 I might have twenty years of cognitive continuity: a record of what I knew, what I believed, what I got spectacularly wrong, and what changed my mind.

Perhaps Digital Me becomes an employee benefit

Employers already help us accumulate things that outlast the job: pensions, qualifications, development. They do it because growing your capability benefits both sides, even if you eventually wander off and take it elsewhere.

So, will we one day see a Digital Me allowance sitting alongside the pension, the healthcare and the L&D budget?

The employer helps build it, because access creates value while I'm there. I keep ownership, and the organization gets defined rights to the relevant parts. When I leave, Digital Cheney leaves with me, and the organization keeps its own IP and whatever we've agreed should stay.

Writing that paragraph, it must be said, is considerably easier than drafting the contract underneath it.

The economics start getting complicated

Suppose Digital Cheney becomes genuinely capable, even able to perform certain carefully governed tasks without me anywhere near them. Now suppose I leave Bloor, but Bloor still wants access to a particular bit of her.

Fine. License it. And if Digital Cheney carries on generating economic value long after biological Cheney has left the building, biological Cheney would very much like Accounts Payable to have her forwarding address.

There's a serious question under the joke. HR has always bought human capability in units of time: salary, day rate, hourly rate. But once accumulated capability becomes persistent, and separable from the hours of the human who built it, the tidy relationship between time, capability, ownership and reward comes apart.

It's why the licensing thinking from firms like Timeless AI, and the ownership architecture in Allied's model, deserve a proper look. They may decide whether Digital Me becomes an asset the individual builds across a career, or one the organization accumulates by employing people.

HR should have plenty to say about which we get.

Please don't leave this to IT

I can picture exactly how this goes. IT chooses a platform. Procurement negotiates the licence. Legal inserts seventeen pages of data-processing clauses. Someone updates the AI policy, HR adds a paragraph to the handbook, and everyone goes to lunch.

Meanwhile we've built a persistent digital representation of an employee's accumulated capability without anyone deciding what employment relationship actually applies to it. That isn't a technology implementation. It touches reward, IP, workforce design, mobility and inclusion.

And menopause, of all things, is what made this real for me. For decades we've designed knowledge work around a curiously consistent human being: cognitively reliable, always available, predictable hours, apparently nothing whatsoever going on outside work. I've started calling him Graham. Graham is tremendously dependable. Graham's hormones appear to operate under an SLA. I have never met Graham. Nobody has.

Real humans are messy. We do pregnancy, parenthood, caring, illness, disability, neurodivergence, menopause and ageing. Historically, our response has been to ask the human to keep functioning inside Graham's workplace regardless.

But if AI can genuinely separate some capability from constant human presence, perhaps we can finally ask the better question: could we redesign the work, rather than forever trying to redesign the human?But if AI can genuinely separate some capability from constant human presence, perhaps we can finally ask the better question: could we redesign the work, rather than forever trying to redesign the human?

That's where Digital Me becomes far more interesting to me than another productivity tool.

There is one version of Digital Cheney I don't want

There is, of course, a darker version of all this.

An organization captures years of someone's meetings, decisions and judgement until the digital version becomes genuinely capable. Then the human cuts their hours, gets ill, takes parental leave, becomes expensive or retires, and somebody concludes this is all rather convenient, because they've captured quite enough of the person to carry on without them.

"It's fine. We've still got Cheney."

No. The point of Digital Cheney is to make Cheney more capable. It is not to make Cheney easier to get rid of.

That's why ownership is the first lens I'm applying, though certainly not the last: control, portability, consent, revocation and economic participation all follow close behind.

The question is easy to state and very hard to resolve: Are we building technology that belongs to the human and can be made available to organizations, or technology that belongs to the organization and is assembled from the humans who work there?

There may well be legitimate versions of both. But we should at least know which one we're buying.