The gateway drug for AI at work

Hi, it’s Greg and Taylor. 👋 Welcome to Supercompanies, our weekly newsletter about building the world’s most valuable companies.

I used to start my day like most people: inbox, Slack, calendar, some combination of scrolling and triaging. I’d scan for what’s urgent, try to remember what I committed to yesterday, and hope nothing important slipped through overnight.

In a couple of years, this will seem as archaic as pulling up MapQuest to print driving directions. Because there’s a version of your morning where an AI has already done the triage for you - scanned your Slack, email, calendar, and meeting transcripts overnight, figured out what actually needs your attention, and delivered a prioritized briefing before you’ve picked up your phone.

We call this an AI Chief of Staff, and it’s one of the most useful things we’ve built at Section. Here’s why it matters and how to build your own.

- Taylor

Why this matters more than it sounds

The AI Chief of Staff isn’t just a morning summary. It’s an on-ramp into working with agents that applies to everyone regardless of role, technical ability, or function.

Three things make it worth your time:

1. It automates something real. Most people have a daily triage process that eats 20 to 30 minutes of their morning (aka, “What came in last night and exactly did I say I’d do today?”). The AI Chief of Staff replaces that.

2. It surfaces things you’d miss. This surprised me. My Chief of Staff regularly flags commitments I made on calls that I’d already forgotten about and insights from Slack or email that I hadn’t seen. It’s not just faster than my old process - it catches things my old process didn’t.

3. It’s a gateway. Most people hear about agents every week. Most still have not experienced one for themselves. Once we gave everyone at Section an AI chief of staff, the question shifts from, “Could AI do this?” to “what else could AI do?” Our own agent building accelerated 2-3X after we rolled this out.

What the Chief of Staff does

Every weekday morning, my Claude agent runs automatically and delivers a briefing to Slack. It scans my connected tools - Slack, Gmail, calendar, Asana, Granola meeting transcripts - and produces a structured report that covers:

• My schedule for the day, with external or high-stakes meetings flagged

• Decisions and actions that need my attention

• Things people are waiting on me for and how long they’ve been waiting

• Follow-ups from yesterday’s meetings

• FYI items worth knowing about

• Overdue tasks or at-risk items

And like any good chief of staff, it’s customized to me. My chief of staff knows to prioritize prep for calls that include Greg and external clients over recurring 1:1s. It knows I draft monthly board update emails, so it highlights insights that would be relevant to the board. When we were fundraising, it prioritized anything from potential investors.

Here’s what the output looks like:

I started with this morning briefing and then over time, I’ve extended my chief of staff’s capabilities.

Now I end the day with an evening briefing from my chief of staff – it runs at 5 PM and tells me everything I committed to throughout the day via Slack, email, or in meetings (via Granola). I review this list and add a task to Asana or dismiss it.

On Fridays, my chief of staff drafts my “3Ps update” – a weekly practice for our leadership team to stay in sync and ID areas of misalignment. My chief of staff reads the 3Ps updates from my direct reports (some sent via slack, others in their 1:1 docs), reviews my slack and granola, and drafts in my voice. I’m still working on the voice – but it saves me 60% of the time and always surfaces at least one update I would have forgotten.

How to build it

We’ve created a project in Claude that walks you through the entire setup. The instructions are here.

Once set up, the project interviews you for about 10-15 minutes. The more specific you are about your role, key collaborators, tools, and priorities, the better it will be.

Here’s the process:

Step 1: Create the interviewer project. Open Claude and create a new project called “AI Chief of Staff Interviewer.” Paste in the project instructions (link here). Start a new chat inside the project.

Step 2: Do the interview. The project will check your connected tools - Slack, calendar, email - to pre-fill what it can, then ask you questions about who you work with, where your important context lives, and what you want surfaced every morning. Be specific.

Step 3: Get your custom prompt. The project generates a complete chief of staff prompt tailored to your role, your people, your tools, and your priorities. Copy it.

Step 4: Set up the scheduled task. In Claude Cowork, create a new scheduled task, paste the prompt, and set it to run every weekday morning. Pick a time before you typically start your day.

Step 5: Run it manually the first time. This is critical and the step most people skip. The first run needs you to approve permissions for each connected tool. If you let it run on schedule at 7 AM without doing this, it’ll hit permission walls and fail silently. Watch the first run, approve its actions, and you’re set.

Step 6: Iterate. Your first briefing will be decent but not perfect. After a few days, go back to the interviewer project and say “I want to recalibrate.” It takes five minutes to adjust what’s being surfaced. Plan to do this every few weeks, especially when your projects or collaborators change.

If you already use Claude Cowork, this should take about 30 minutes total - 15 for the interview, 15 for setup. If you’ve never used Cowork, this is a great reason to start.

One note: the instructions are built for Claude, but the prompt itself is portable. If you’re on ChatGPT with automations, the core prompt works there too - you’ll just need to adjust the tool-specific steps.

If you do one thing this weekend, build your AI Chief of Staff. It’s the single easiest way to experience what it feels like to have an agent doing real work for you every day.

Having an AI chief of staff doesn’t make you a Supercompany. But every Supercompany will run on AI chiefs of staff and similar personal agents - and it’s the fastest way to quickly make this new way of working feel a lot less abstract.

Greg and Taylor