Meet Junior

This AI employee clocks in before your staff

- SUGANDHA MUKHERJEE

AT 8.12 AM, before anyone in the office has opened a laptop, Junior has already begun work.

It has reviewed overnight customer emails, summarised three sales leads that went quiet last week, flagged a delayed payment, drafted responses for the operations head and reminded the founders that a product launch promised for Friday still lacks final approval. By the time the first employee joins Slack, Junior has left notes in four channels and scheduled two followups.

According to the startup Kuse AI, Junior's creator, this is not a metaphor. Founded by Hong Kong-based 31-year-old Xiankun Wu, the company is offering a new type of colleague who is entirely virtual and behaves uncannily like the most driven new hire you've ever worked with. Junior is being sold as an AI employee rather than another software tool, a distinction that says much about the next phase of artificial intelligence in the workplace.

"We didn’t build Junior. Juniors build Junior with us. We shipped it because we could not imagine working without it anymore,’ said Xiankun Wu, CEO of Kuse Inc at its launch. Founded in early 2024, Kuse Inc's sole mission is to make AI the most capable and trusted partner in human creativity. Other than Junior, the company has Kuse, which is an Agentic AI coworker built for professionals, solopreneurs, and freelancers, helping with drafting reports to building presentations.