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Not watched. Coached.

Most tools in this market install a desktop agent and watch the screen. InRoots reads one line a day in chat, verifies it and explains a score. The differences follow from that.

Input

  • Agent-based tools: desktop agent, screenshots, app and URL logs, sometimes keystrokes, sometimes live screen
  • InRoots: a one-line check-in in chat or spoken to the assistant; presence confirmed with a consented ping; work activity from the tools you connect; the one optional capture feature is off by default and requires the employee's signed consent

What is measured

  • Agent-based tools: activity proxies (active time, app categories) classified by a black box
  • InRoots: outcomes (tasks shipped, blockers cleared, on-call coverage, objectives) cross-checked against Jira, GitHub and GitLab, weighted in the open

Who sees what

  • Agent-based tools: managers see everything; employees see little or nothing
  • InRoots: the employee sees their own scorecard first and can ask for it in chat; the lead and the team see the same number; admin-only views are advisory and explained

How the AI is used

  • Agent-based tools: AI classifies apps and screenshots as productive or not, usually through a vendor cloud, with no explanation attached
  • InRoots: the AI parses, verifies, summarises, coaches from the person's own work and routes; the score is deterministic arithmetic; every automated decision carries a confidence and a reason and can be undone

Whose model, whose data

  • Agent-based tools: the vendor's model, trained on customer data across tenants
  • InRoots: any of 16 providers or a local model; the neural layer learns inside your instance from your history only; InRoots trains nothing on your data

What happens when the AI is unsure

  • Agent-based tools: the classification is recorded anyway
  • InRoots: below the confidence bar a person decides; strikes never leave human review; a runtime agent that is unsure says so

Where the data lives

  • Agent-based tools: vendor cloud, sometimes with an on-premise option at the top tier
  • InRoots: self-hosted in one container or hosted by us, same features either way, no telemetry, on-host geo

The result

Teams accept what is fair and visible. That is the whole difference, and it is why InRoots calls itself a productivity app, not a monitoring tool.