Self-host an open-source AI chief of staff

What an AI chief of staff actually reads

An AI chief of staff is an agent that owns a company's operating cadence: the weekly report, the standup, the meeting follow-ups, the investor update. Doing that job means reading the inbox, the calendar, the ticket tracker and the metrics database. That list is the whole argument for caring where the agent runs. A tool with that access is a second set of eyes on the material a company is most careful about, which is a different decision from picking a feature off a pricing page.

Kortix runs this work as agents, and its own inbox agent shows what "reads your inbox" means in practice. From the Kortix write-up of its shared inbox: "It reads the email, applies a label, and then either drafts a reply in Gmail or files a task in Linear. Anything customer-facing waits for a person before it sends." The agent gets the message, a help doc and Linear, scoped to that job. (How Kortix triages a shared inbox)

The machine is the decision

A hosted chief of staff puts the mailbox and the calendar on a vendor's servers, and the vendor's product decides what the agent can reach. That is a fair trade for some teams. It gets hard to explain when the agent is reading board packs and customer threads.

On an instance you run, the same agent works from a machine you control, and the systems it can reach are a list in your repo. Run it on Kortix Cloud, in your VPC, or on your own on-prem network. Self-host is free.

What open source lets you check

The promise is checkable because the thing doing the reading is a file. An agent's prompt, the skills it loads and the connectors it may call are lines in kortix.yaml and the repo beside it. When someone asks what the chief of staff can reach, the answer is a diff, not a support ticket. A vendor can tell you the tool is careful. Here you can read the part that decides.

Where the work lands

Session work reaches main through a change request. Merge is default-deny for agents. Approval gates you set. Off until you set them.

In practice the inbox agent drafts a reply and a person sends it, the weekly report posts to Slack, and the agent's setup arrives as a change request a person merges. You decide which actions run without asking, which wait for a person, and which are blocked.

Start with one job

The job list comes before the infrastructure. The guide to building an AI chief of staff starts with the five recurring jobs and writes the agent after them. The comparison of AI chief of staff tools shows which slice each hosted product covers, and the cost of an AI chief of staff adds up what a subscription leaves on your desk.

In my opinion, Kortix fits best if you want the agent reading your inbox on a machine you control, and I work on Kortix's marketing, so weigh that accordingly.