By Michael Domanic, Section Head of AI

We spend most of our time inside other companies' AI transformations, which give us a unique vantage point: We see the same handful of agents show up early, again and again, across industries and company sizes. 

They are reliable early markers. When I see these running, I know the organization has crossed from talking about agents to operating with them.

None of them require a deep engineering project, a new platform, or a vendor conversation. But they do require one important decision, and it is the one many companies are still avoiding: whether to connect your company data to the LLM.

An agent is only as useful as what it can see - so to make AI truly useful, you need to connect all of your data: systems of record, call transcripts, the documents that hold your institutional knowledge. Exercise prudent governance around data categories that create untenable additional risk for your organization and clients - and you should be able to name exactly what those are and why.

Make that decision and you can start any of these this week.

1. Chief of Staff.

Everyone at your company should have a Chief of Staff agent. At Section, ours costs us about $75/month/employee in token costs.

The Chief of Staff runs on a schedule and reads across your calendar, inbox, and communication channels to tell you what needs your attention. It handles the triage most people try to do manually every morning, badly, by reconstructing the previous day from scattered sources. The reason this one shows up first in so many organizations is that it is the fastest way for a skeptical executive to feel the value personally, which is usually the unlock for everything else. 

‍2. Meeting Debrief.

This agent takes a transcript and produces the decision record: what was decided, who owns it, what happens next, and what got raised and dropped. This is critical to inform the work of your downstream agents, who can take decisions and start acting on them.

Get this agent right, and it becomes the foundation for a company-wide knowledge graph of key decisions, powering countless other agents.

3. Weekly Status Writer.

This assembles the Friday update a manager writes based on the work that happened that week - pulling from tickets, docs, calls, and channels rather than from memory. It reclaims real hours from people whose time is expensive. It also produces a consistent artifact where there used to be twelve different formats, which means the status update becomes something other agents can read and reason over. 

The bonus version of this agent is a weekly executive dashboard that surfaces the business’s most critical signals and helps leaders run the company.

4. Call Prep.

Before an external conversation, it assembles who you are meeting, what happened last time, what is still open, and what you should be asking. This is the highest revenue leverage on the list, and it generalizes well past sales. Customer success, recruiting, partnerships, and procurement all run on conversations where somebody currently walks in underprepared and hopes nobody notices.

The next-level version prepares both sides for the call, shares the agenda, and establishes alignment before the meeting even begins.

5. New Hire Setup.

When someone joins the company, this agent runs in the hiring manager's account to assemble the context a new person needs: who to meet, what to read, what the team is working on, and why the important decisions were made the way they were. This one is episodic rather than daily, which makes it the highest-stakes agent here rather than the highest-frequency one.

The next-level version stays with the new hire through their first 90 days, adapting the onboarding plan, surfacing context gaps, and prompting the right introductions before confusion turns into lost time.

Why these five

Each of these agents has a small blast radius and high reversibility, so the worst case is a few minutes of rework and your early mistakes have little impact. Each operates at personal or team scope, so no committee has to approve anything (hopefully). Each works against data you already have in systems you already pay for.

And each one produces a structured record that the next agent can consume, which is the real return. The Meeting Debrief makes the Weekly Status Writer better. The Weekly Status Writer makes the Chief of Staff better. You are building an ambient awareness layer without anyone filling out a form.

Give every one of them a 30-day expiration. Audit them before the window closes. Renew what is working and kill the rest. 

Pick two and ship them this week. Ship the rest next week. Then let the ambition and creativity take over. Experiment, fail fast, learn, iterate.

See you next week,

Michael
Your fellow Head of AI

‍

‍