The idea of an AI Chief of Staff has quickly gained currency as AI agents have had their moment in early 2026. And at the pace the AI industry is moving right now, it's no surprise that the concept now has an official product.

On Wednesday, Quill launched Quilliam, its "Chief of AI Staff" with the purpose of powering up knowledge workers rather than replacing them and doing it in a way that can preserve security, sovereignty, and localization of data. Previously known as Quill Meetings and a competitor of products such as Granola and Fireflies, the company is transforming itself around making meetings more actionable with agentic AI.

At the same time, Quill announced a $6.5 million seed funding round and a new COO, Yacob Berhane, to pursue the new mission. The Deep View spoke with both Berhane and CEO Michael Daugherty about the launch of their Chief of AI Staff.

Here's what they highlighted it can do:

• Turn meeting action items into concrete actions: Automatically create or update project management tickets, Notion docs, and other systems of record, showing you a high‑level plan and then executing after you click approve.
• Automate follow‑through beyond meetings: It can draft emails, memos, and summaries tailored to each recipient or use case, such as VC rejection emails, internal investment memos, or a recap email from a parent‑teacher conference. So you start with decision‑making, not recaps.
• Use your entire meeting history as context: It lets you query across all past calls (e.g., “Catch me up on the last call” or “Summarize top security requests from my last three meetings”), and then it can spin those insights into structured work.
• Keep you present in meetings while capturing what matters: It lets you mark highlights and take screenshots in real time; those cues are used to personalize notes and pull out examples you were thinking about, even if you didn’t fully verbalize them in the meeting.
• Run privately on your own machine, even fully offline: The agent records and stores audio and transcripts locally, can enforce strict deletion policies, and can run against local models (e.g., OpenAI's GPT‑OSS 20B) and with Wi‑Fi off, so no meeting data has to leave the device.

Our Deeper View

In our discussion, Daugherty emphasized two different paradigms for agents. He said, “You either end up with a Waymo car, where you have an agent operating on its own… or you end up with an Iron Man suit where you are responsible for the outputs, you are actually in control, but it's making you much stronger and able to do a lot more." Daughtery portrayed Quill's agent as the Iron Man suit. That's a metaphor that's going to make a lot more professionals and enterprises comfortable. And, taking action on your meeting notes is a great place for AI agents to get started in clawing back time for workers. Naturally, this will have the biggest impact on people who spend at least half their day in meetings, rather than on individual contributors who are heads-down all day working on projects.