Hire Erlo, Your AI Chief of Staff Who Does the Follow-ups

What is an AI chief of staff?

An AI chief of staff is an AI agent that does the routine part of a chief of staff’s job for a founder or executive: it reads the inbox, sends a daily brief, prepares meetings, chases follow-ups and routes work to the right person. Unlike a chatbot, it runs on a schedule and acts without being prompted, and a good one asks before anything leaves the company.

A human chief of staff is a senior partner who runs priorities, communication and follow-through so the person they work for can focus on the big decisions. It is a bigger job than an executive assistant’s, and real chiefs of staff do a lot of judgment work that no AI should do alone. An AI chief of staff is closer to an AI executive assistant with a team to run: a personal AI agent that handles the workflow around you. The AI version takes the busywork, so a founder without a chief of staff gets most of the benefit, and a real chief of staff gets their week back.

The chief of staff role: what an AI chief of staff can handle

• A morning brief or daily brief: what needs your attention, today’s meetings and who you’re waiting on.
• Inbox triage: flag what matters in one person’s inbox, file the rest, draft the replies you owe.
• Meeting prep and meeting notes: a summary before the call, action items after it.
• Follow-ups: chase unanswered emails and open tasks without being annoying.
• Routing: hand a request to the right teammate or AI agent, with context.
• Relationship management: notice who you haven’t answered, and keep your CRM notes up to date.
• Reporting: a weekly summary of finished work, decisions and what’s next.

What it shouldn’t do alone: hire, fire, negotiate or send anything sensitive without a human looking first.

AI chief of staff vs human chiefs of staff, and the new Chief of AI

In the US a human chief of staff earns about $150,000 a year by Indeed’s figures and about $210,000 by Salary.com’s. One salary buys judgment, relationships and someone who can walk into a room for you. An AI chief of staff costs a fraction of that, works at 6am on a Sunday and never forgets a follow-up, but it should not make the calls.

Chiefs of staff are expensive because the good ones are rare. Most founders don’t choose between the two. Before you can justify a full chief of staff, an AI handles the routine. Once you hire one, the AI becomes their assistant and frees them for the work only a person can do. Many chiefs of staff now call part of their job “Chief of AI”: deciding which work the AI tools take on, owning the company’s AI strategy and AI adoption, and watching the AI risk that comes with it.

How to build an AI chief of staff yourself, if you want to build one

Plenty of people build one themselves, and many started with Claude. A common setup is Claude Code on a Claude Max plan, using Claude Sonnet for the routine jobs. A chief of staff agent needs memory, access and a schedule, and the agent running it needs someone to check its work. The usual recipe:

1. Write down the jobs: one recurring job at a time, starting with a daily brief.
2. Give the agent a set of files as memory: clients, preferences, open tasks.
3. Connect the inbox, calendar and CRM through an integration, read-only to start.
4. Write the prompt for each job and run it as a scheduled job.
5. Add approval gates before anything that sends, and a log of what ran.

It works, but it takes upkeep. A Fast Company piece from September 2026 described building one on Claude Code for about $25 a day, and the lesson that stuck was that agents fail quietly: when a data source isn’t connected, the agent guesses instead of saying so. If you build the system yourself, build the checks too. Connecting AI to your inbox is the easy part; the real skill is deciding what the agent may do alone.

The daily brief your AI plan can already do

Before buying anything, check what your current AI plan includes:

• ChatGPT: scheduled tasks on any paid tier can send you a daily brief. OpenAI shut down Pulse, its daily brief feature, in June 2026 and pointed people to tasks instead.
• Claude: Claude Cowork can run scheduled tasks on paid plans, and connects to Gmail and Google Calendar.
• Gemini: a Daily Brief built from Gmail and Calendar, on Google AI Plus, Pro and Ultra in the US.

For most AI users, an AI daily brief like this is the easiest first step, and once the AI runs every morning you see quickly what else to hand over. These are one AI tool running a prompt on a schedule: useful automation, not a chief of staff. They are a good start, and they stop where a team starts: routing work, shared memory and approvals.

The best AI chief of staff tool for each use case in 2026

Most "best AI chief of staff" lists are written by vendors that rank themselves first, so judge them by what each tool is built for:

• Tenbrain (Erlo): an AI chief of staff inside a team of AI employees, with a daily brief, triage, follow-ups, routing, shared memory and approvals, on your Claude or ChatGPT plan. $29 a month.
• alfred_: an AI assistant for email, calendar and client follow-ups.
• Lindy: an AI teammate for the inbox, meeting notes and routines, with many integrations.
• Martin: an AI assistant you reach by call, text or email, from $21 a month billed yearly.
• Motion and Reclaim.ai: AI calendars and project planning, strong on scheduling.
• Superhuman: AI email, now part of a wider productivity suite.

Notion AI and Microsoft Copilot also appear on many lists; they work best if your team already lives in Notion or Microsoft 365.

Access limits and approval gates for an AI agent

Give an AI chief of staff the least access that does the job, and raise it as it earns trust. Start read-only on the inbox, let it draft before it acts, and keep a human approval on anything that sends, posts or pays. Keep a log you can read, and check it for a week before giving more.

In Tenbrain each website gets its own level (read only, ask me or trusted), and anything that sends, posts or pays waits for your OK whatever the level.

Erlo: an AI executive assistant and chief of staff for founders

Erlo is the Chief of Staff in Tenbrain, an AI employee platform. He sends your morning brief, triages the inbox, preps meetings, chases follow-ups and hands work to your other AI employees. He remembers your business, you can ask him what he knows or correct him in chat, and he runs in a private workspace of your own in the cloud, so the work carries on when your laptop is closed.

Erlo uses the AI models in the plan you already pay for: Claude Pro or Max, ChatGPT Plus, Pro or Business, or SuperGrok. Tenbrain Pro is $29 a month and Max $69; see Tenbrain’s plans or read the user guide.

How to choose the best AI chief of staff

• Only need a daily brief? Start with your AI plan’s scheduled tasks.
• Love building things? Build your own with Claude, and build the checks too.
• Calendar is the problem? Motion or Reclaim.ai.
• Want the whole job done, with a team to hand work to and approvals built in? Erlo in Tenbrain.

Whatever you pick, start with one recurring job, read its output for a week, and only then give it more. Weighing AI tools more widely? See our OpenAI alternatives guide, or book a demo.