An AI chief of staff
Once you have handed over more than one job, somebody has to keep them in order, and if that somebody is you, you have swapped doing the work for supervising it. The chief of staff job is that order: it plans across every job it holds, tracks what is waiting on whom, and brings you one briefing instead of twenty updates.
Concretely
- Plans the work across every job it holds.
- Keeps track of what is in progress and what is waiting on a person.
- Creates executive briefings.
- Escalates the issues that need you, and only those.
- Coordinates work that crosses departments.
The problem this job exists for
Automation has a second-order cost nobody warns you about. Each thing you hand over is a small win, and then you are the integration layer: checking five outputs, remembering which one is waiting on the accountant, noticing that two of them did the same work. At about the third job, supervising costs more than doing did.
What a chief of staff actually does here
It sits above the other jobs rather than beside them. It knows what each one is meant to be doing, works out what should happen next, tracks what is blocked and on whom, and gives you one briefing with the things that genuinely need a decision. The rest it handles or holds, and says so.
One briefing, not a feed
A notification per event is not visibility, it is noise with good intentions. The briefing is written to be read once: what moved, what is stuck, what needs you today, and what it decided not to touch. If nothing needs you, it says that too, which is the part most products cannot bring themselves to do.
When you do not need this yet
If you have handed over one job, you do not need a chief of staff, you need that job to work. This is worth adding when you have three or more and have started to notice yourself keeping track of them. Adding it costs nothing extra, because you pay for work rather than for jobs held, but adding it early just gives you a briefing about one thing.
The jobs this comes from
Sanaf holds thirty five written job descriptions. These are the ones behind this page.