Actors: people, robots, and agents

In Orgonaut, actor is the core entity for contributors in your organisation model.

Using one model for people, robots, and agents gives you a consistent way to represent placement, allocation, role structure, and cost impact.

Actor types

Why this matters

Without a unified actor model, you end up with separate systems for humans and non-human contributors. That makes analysis incomplete.

With actors, you can answer questions like:

• Where are we using AI agents in the structure?
• Which teams are over-allocated when all contributors are included?
• How does the people-to-agent mix change across scenarios?

How actors connect to structure

Actors are placed into org units through placements.

• Home placement is represented by primary = true.
• Additional placements can represent cross-team contribution.
• Allocation percentage is modeled per placement, while FTE represents the actor's total capacity.

This keeps organisational placement explicit and auditable.

Actors and positions

Positions capture role metadata (title, level, discipline).

Assigning positions to actors helps with:

• role clarity in matrix and charts views
• capability mapping by department/team
• scenario comparison by role mix

Good modeling practices

• Use one row per real contributor identity.
• Keep actor names stable over time.
• Treat actor email as contact data, not the durable Orgonaut identity.
• Let Orgonaut manage the actor's durable external_uid.
• Let integrations manage source_hris and source_hris_id rather than editing them manually.
• Use placement dates when changes are time-bound.
• Use tags and metadata for classification, not duplicate actor records.

Actor identity fields

Every actor now has a durable Orgonaut-owned identifier:

• external_uid: stable Orgonaut identity for people, robots, and agents

Actors can also carry one source HRIS identity directly on the actor record:

• source_hris: source slug such as bamboohr
• source_hris_id: the source-side record identifier such as a BambooHR PersonID

For human actors, email is optional. This supports HRIS imports where a person record has no usable email but does have a stable source-system identifier.

Common mistakes

• Treating a budgeted team or temporary contribution as home placement.
• Inferring department from legacy columns instead of placements.
• Creating duplicate actor records to represent temporary allocation changes.
• Using actors.id as an external identity in imports or integrations.

Related guides

• Placements and allocation
• Positions
• Scenario overview