Everything below is based on DelegateWorker's own public pages and pricing as of September 2026, and on Harlyn's shipped behavior. If either product changes, this page is dated so you can tell how stale it is.
DelegateWorker (from Fractional Labs Inc., founded by Sasan Zarrin) sells AI workers: named AI participants with a role and a plain-language brief, deployed into Zoom and Teams meetings, phone calls, web calls, SMS, and WhatsApp. The center of gravity is operational capacity. Their own material is refreshingly direct that the sweet spot is repeatable, structured conversations, intake calls, first-round screens, demos, and that it is less useful where improvisation and relationship judgment carry the meeting. The deliverable is a decision-ready memo shortly after the conversation ends.
Harlyn is an AI delegate: it stands in for one specific person in a real meeting that person cannot attend. You brief it on what to share, what to ask, and what context it holds privately. In the room it delivers your update in your words, answers questions out loud from your briefing and your connected tools (HubSpot, Salesforce, and others), and defers anything outside its mandate back to you. The deliverable is the meeting handled, plus the full record.
Same disclosure ethic on both sides, worth saying plainly: both products join as visible, named AI participants. Neither hides. If you are evaluating this category at all, treat covert operation by any vendor as disqualifying.
DelegateWorker's cleanest idea is authority tiers: an Observer that listens and reports, a Voice that also carries your prepared questions and positions into the discussion, and a Proxy that represents your stated positions on defined topics and escalates the rest.
Harlyn's model covers the same ground with different machinery: attendee mode is the quiet observer, delegate mode carries your update and questions, and the briefing itself defines what the delegate may assert or commit to, with everything unbriefed deferred by default. The philosophical overlap is real, and it is a good sign for the category that both products converged on "represent what you were told, escalate what you were not."
The difference is what happens at the escalation moment, and it is the biggest practical difference between the two products.
What the AI answers from. DelegateWorker's worker speaks from its brief. Its integrations are workflow destinations for output, not sources it speaks from. Harlyn's delegate answers from your brief and from your live systems: ask it where a renewal stands and it answers out loud from your CRM, in about a second, with the meeting still moving. If the questions in your meetings are about your data, this is the difference you will feel first.
What happens when the AI is out of its depth. DelegateWorker escalates outside-the-brief topics into the post-meeting memo. Harlyn does that too, but first it tries something better: it messages you in Slack while the meeting is still running, and if you reply in time, it speaks your answer into the room, attributed to you. In live testing that round trip runs about nine seconds when the owner replies promptly. A question that would have become a follow-up email instead gets answered in the meeting it was asked in.
What happens to the action items. Both products capture follow-ups. Harlyn also executes them, with a hard rule: every write to your systems, a CRM update, a task in Linear, is staged, read back, and performed only on an explicit yes, in the room or from your dashboard afterward. If you want the meeting's output to be work completed rather than work listed, that approval-gated execution is currently Harlyn's territory.
Memory across meetings. Harlyn keeps a commitment ledger: promises made by you and to you, tracked across meetings, checked against your tools, and surfaced before the next meeting with the same people. DelegateWorker's memo is per-conversation.
Channels. The comparison runs the other way here. DelegateWorker covers phone calls, SMS, and WhatsApp alongside meetings, and is built to run many scripted conversations in parallel. Harlyn is a meetings product, Zoom, Meet, and Teams, one delegate per absent owner. If your problem is inbound call volume, Harlyn is not your tool.
DelegateWorker publishes per-minute pricing anchored to the cost of the human work replaced: a free invite-only tier, Solo at $125 for 100 minutes, a Seat at $749 per month for 600 minutes with per-minute top-ups, and team and custom tiers above that, plus per-channel usage charges.
Harlyn is in private beta and currently free, with feedback as the price. A published price will come with general availability, so a fair cost comparison is not yet possible, and this page will say so until it is.
Choose DelegateWorker if you need operational conversation capacity: structured, repeatable calls and meetings run by a briefed AI in a defined role, across meetings and phone channels, at volume.
Choose Harlyn if a specific meeting needs a specific absent person: your update delivered, questions about your accounts answered from your own systems out loud, decisions routed back to you live, and follow-through executed only on your yes, with the note-taker layer included so nothing else needs to join the call.
The overlap in language between the two products is larger than the overlap in behavior. Both will tell you an AI can hold your seat. What it does while sitting in it is the whole decision.