Issue 27: 4️⃣ Ways Generative AI Can Help Chiefs of Staff Save Time and Be More Effective
With the latest updates and upgrades to AI, how can Chiefs of Staff utilize AI powered tools to be more efficient?
Welcome back, aspiring and current Chiefs of Staff!
This week’s issue is brought to you by Ambient. Ambient is the first AI Assistant designed for Chiefs of Staff.
Ambient uses AI to summarize and thread live meetings (Zoom, Teams, Meet) and Slack Channels, with a particular focus on extracting Action Items, Project Owners, and Timelines. I’ve seen it in action in meetings with partners and have been so impressed with the follow up action items and meeting summaries. Try Ambient free for 30 days with code: Clara202
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How can Chiefs of Staff use generative AI to automate tasks and save time?
It’s been six months since we published our article: “Chiefs of Staff and GPT - Do they blend?” And a lot has changed. The underlying technology has gotten more powerful, billions of dollars of venture capital have poured into companies building applications on top of these foundational models, and humans, as a species, have had more time to play with the tech.
So we figured it was time to revisit generative AI (Gen AI) from the perspective of the Chief of Staff:
Can this technology make us better at our jobs?
What work streams and projects can be automated or partially automated?
Can generative AI save us time so we can focus on truly dial moving activities?
To help answer this question, I teamed up with Lawrence Coburn, the CEO and co-founder of Ambient, a purpose built AI Assistant for Chiefs of Staff, who shared four broad areas that he believes that AI can help automate, giving time back to the Chief.
These four workflows are the result of more than one hundred interviews that Lawrence conducted with Chiefs of Staff; some of the Gen AI applications he mentions are available today, while others are either in development or pure whiteboard mode.
1️⃣ Note Taking with a Particular Focus on Action Items, Project Owners, and Timelines
A crucial part of the Chief of Staff role is running executive leadership team meetings. But not only do they have to run the meetings, they are also responsible for capturing the notes, with a particular focus on action items and next steps. These action items of course need to be followed up on, and often they become the structure of the next meeting’s agenda.
It’s a lot to manage.
Fortunately, this is a problem space that generative AI is ready to help with right now. One of Gen AI’s current superpowers is its ability to quickly summarize vast quantities of information (like a two hour transcript)..
AI note taking is surging in popularity right now, and there are already a bevy of generalist AI note taking tools on the market (for example, Otter, Fireflies, just to name a few). What will separate the Swiss army knife, one size fits all tools from those that are “Chief of Staff ready” are the attention to detail on Next Steps, Project Owners, and Timelines, along with all the necessary associated integrations and permissions.
On a related note, the participation of bots on virtual meetings on platforms like Zoom, Teams, and Meet feels like a behavioral shift that is surging as knowledge workers see first hand the power of not having to worry about taking the notes.
2️⃣ Agenda Setting and Topic Forecasting
A key lever of influence for Chiefs of Staff is the ability to influence the topics and priorities that get attention at the Executive level.
Many Chiefs of Staff are tasked not only with preparing agendas for key internal meetings, but also keeping a pulse of the top three, or five, or ten topics or issues that need executive attention.
Generative AI should be able to help here, once again, through its ability to synthesize vast amounts of data lurking in meeting transcripts, Slack channels, and even email.
We are not aware of any product yet in the market that is applying AI in this way, but it is a problem space that Ambient is exploring. In the meantime, you can feed a meeting transcript into ChatGPT to summarize. Then ask ChatGPT to suggest a follow. up meeting agenda based on the transcript.
3️⃣ Time Tracking and Frameworks
The Chief of Staff role is often misunderstood (even by principals who have a Chief of Staff), causing them to be pulled in any number of directions. The temptation for organizations to make the Chief of Staff their “Easy Button” is real, and as such, it is crucial that the Chief of Staff be intentional with every hour of the week.
Just time tracking is not enough. Frameworks can be helpful to visualize current time allocation patterns and spark conversations about what the ideal time allocation might look like.
Time tracking and intentional time allocation also has value beyond the Chief of Staff. Perhaps even more company value can be gained in helping the principal better understand where their own hours are going.
We believe that the age of AI powered calendar analysis is coming soon; Google Calendar Insights offers a very early glimpse of the kinds of things that will be possible. Platforms like Motion and Timely offer individual and company wide time trackers and schedulers that are starting to help with seeing how time is spent and suggesting optimal times to accomplish certain tasks. Our hope is that Chief of Staff specific analyses come online soon.
If you’re looking for additional resources on time boxing and time blocking, check out this HBR article.
4️⃣ QBR and Cross Departmental Project Reporting
While the role of Chief of Staff can vary greatly from company to company, one consistent pattern is that the Chief of Staff is typically the person in charge of wrangling (and reporting on) cross departmental initiatives.
Reporting on these initiatives can be manual and time consuming; often the Chief of Staff has to chase down updates from various working groups, and inevitably those status reports come in at varying levels of detail and in various formats.
Gen AI enables a better way. With Gen AI’s summarization capabilities, it’s easy to imagine a productized snapshot of any cross departmental initiative, gleaned from meeting notes, Slack conversations, email exchanges and more: all with the tap of a button. A platform like Stellar starts to automate, streamline, and enhance OKR setting tracking - a common practice at many organizations as a tool for goal setting and cross departmental collaboration.
It’s no secret that a Chief of Staff is responsible for a wide range of activities and all of them must be done at an executive level. In a previous issue, we talked about delegating to others so that a Chief of Staff can better use their time to work in their zone of genius. As generative AI continues to improve and update, the possibility for Chiefs of Staff to be able to delegate parts of their workload to AI becomes more and more feasible.
Are you a current Chief of Staff using generative AI in a way we didn’t touch on? We’d love to hear from you! Just hit reply on this email 📧
And if you would like to try out Ambient for free, an AI Assistant designed specifically for Chiefs of Staff, you can do so HERE.
Hope you found the latest issue of this newsletter helpful. We’re looking to you for future newsletter topics! If you have any questions around being a Chief of Staff, tactical takeaways that you can apply, or other curiosities about the Chief of Staff role, submit a question below and we’ll answer it in a future newsletter issue:
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Additional Chief of Staff Related Reads:
We spoke to 100 Chiefs of Staff, here’s what we Learned
McChrystal Group’s Chief of Staff Framework
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👋🏼 Until the next issue,
Clara
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