What an open-source AI chief of staff owns
An AI chief of staff is the agent that keeps a company’s weekly rhythm running: the report, the standup, the follow-ups, the investor update. Kortix is the open-source CompanyOS: your agents, their skills, your company memory, and every connector in one git repo you own, with the agents working on real cloud computers.
The meeting-notes agent, in its own words
When a call ends, it spawns its own isolated session — a cloud sandbox — with scoped access to what note-taking needs: the event, the transcript, and Linear. It writes structured notes, pulls out the action items, and files each one as a ticket assigned to the person who owns it.The follow-up exists as a ticket before the next meeting starts.
What an AI chief of staff is
The job is a set of recurring outputs. The weekly report, the standup, the meeting follow-ups, the investor update: these come back every week and get done by whoever has a free hour. An agent that holds them starts each one on a trigger, so the work happens whether or not anyone opens a chat window.
The calendar is the test
The test is the calendar. Close the app for a week and look at what still happened. A chat assistant leaves a trail of answers that someone still has to act on. A chief of staff leaves a report in Slack on Monday, a ticket in the tracker after each call, and a draft investor update waiting for an edit.
A morning brief is the usual stopping point. A brief is a read of the day: it tells you a call happened and what was said. It does not file the follow-up that never became a task, and it does not build the report nobody had time to build. Those two gaps are the job.
The work a chief of staff owns
The role is easier to define by its output than by its title. On Kortix these are six jobs, each one an agent with its own trigger, its own connectors and its own output.
- The weekly report. A Monday cron queries the metrics, writes the report with commentary on what moved and why, and posts it to Slack. The database access is read-only. Kortix's weekly report agent
- The standup. It reads each person's recent Linear issues and GitHub activity, builds a per-person summary, and posts the standup to a Slack channel. Kortix's standup agent
- Meeting notes. When a call ends, the agent writes structured notes and files each action item as a ticket assigned to the person who owns it. Kortix's meeting notes agent
- The investor update. It pulls MRR, growth, burn, runway and active accounts, compares them to last month and to plan, and drafts the update in your usual format. A founder edits and sends it. Kortix's investor update agent
- Inbox triage. 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. Kortix's inbox triage agent
- QBR prep. It assembles the quarter into a draft deck in Google Slides and a briefing doc in Google Docs, then stops. Nothing is shared or sent. Kortix's QBR prep agent
What the cadence runs on
An AI chief of staff needs three things: a schedule, a machine to run each job on, and a config you can read and change. On Kortix all three live in one git repo.
The schedule is a trigger, declared in kortix.yaml. A schedule, a webhook or an event in another app starts a session with nobody at the keyboard.
Each run is a session. One isolated sandbox per session. Each session has its own isolated machine and branch, so the report job and the inbox job do not share a machine or a branch.
Approval gates you set. Off until you set them, so decide which jobs may run without a person before the schedule starts. Run it on Kortix Cloud, in your VPC, or on your own on-prem network. Self-host is free.
In my opinion, Kortix is the right place to run this cadence if you want the jobs, the schedule and the config in a repo you own, and I work on Kortix's marketing, so weigh that accordingly.
If you are choosing between products, the AI chief of staff tools comparison covers which slice of the job each one runs. If you would rather build the first job yourself, how to build an AI chief of staff starts with the job list. What an AI chief of staff costs covers the credits and the work each plan leaves on your desk.
Questions people ask about an AI chief of staff
What does an AI chief of staff do?
It produces the work the role produces: a Monday report with commentary, notes and tickets after each call, a drafted investor update, a triaged inbox. Each job starts on its own trigger, so it happens whether or not you open the app.
Is an AI chief of staff the same as an AI assistant?
No. An assistant answers when you ask and hands the work back. A chief of staff owns the job end to end and runs it on a calendar, so the test is what still happened in a week you did not open it.
What can an AI chief of staff not do?
It cannot make the judgment call or hold the relationship. It prepares the report, the notes and the draft, and a person decides and sends. Anything customer-facing waits for a person.
Does an AI chief of staff need access to my email and calendar?
Yes, for the jobs that read them. Inbox triage reads the mailbox, and meeting notes read the calendar and the transcript, so both need to be connected before either job can run.
Give the cadence a place to run
Start with one job, the weekly report or the meeting follow-ups, and add the rest when the first one holds.
Self-host is free · Free is $0 with 500 credits per month · Merge is default-deny for agents