or over a decade, the tech industry has been racing to create the perfect virtual assistant. Now, the goal is rapidly shifting due to AI agents. The new north star is to create an AI chief of staff.

So, what's the difference, and what does that look like?

Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, and countless other virtual assistants have been trying to cozy up to us for over a decade, automating tasks and reducing the number of steps to get things done. But they've mostly been pretty disappointing, limited to little more than announcing the weather, setting cooking timers, and helping dictate messages.

The new AI agent boom, led by Claude Code / Claude Cowork and OpenClaw, has changed the equation in just the past two months. Even just a few weeks ago, we were talking about how these new tools were finally launching the era of true "personal AI agents" that can perform routine tasks on our behalf.

But the concept has advanced even further in recent weeks, especially driven by the OpenClaw community. The enthusiasts who are spinning up OpenClaw instances are racing ahead, giving us a picture of the future of agents. They have rapidly gone from trying to create super-smart, widely skilled agents to orchestrating teams of agents, each with dedicated strengths and specific capabilities, not unlike human teams. For many of these folks, they now have a stack of Mac minis running multiple agents and sub-agents.

And that's where a different concept has now emerged: the AI chief of staff.

I first heard it from Jason Calacanis on This Week in Startups, where Calacanis was recently speaking to Mitesh Agrawal of Positron AI and said, "This is going to save you inbox management [and] Slack management. These are the chores that you typically, as CEO, would hire a chief of staff [or] an executive assistant to do. You've now used an OpenClaw agent to do [it]."

Agrawal reported that it's saving him an average of at least 30 minutes per day. Calacanis pointed out that's over 3 hours per week (for a startup founder) and 150 hours per year, which is the equivalent of getting 3 extra weeks per year. That kind of time savings compounds over time, and it's likely to accelerate as the technology improves and gets easier for more people to access.

Our Deeper View

Another concept Calacanis used to understand the power of this chief of staff phenomenon was to view it as democratizing services previously available only to the ultra-wealthy. He compared it to the way Uber can act like your personal chauffeur, Airbnb can function like having vacation homes in beautiful cities around the world, and JSX can make it feel like having a private jet. A chief of staff is someone who knows your needs and preferences and can act independently to make important tasks happen on your behalf. It was previously something limited to presidents, heads of state, and CEOs. That's a lot for AI agents to live up to. But if they can pull it off, it will become one of the most powerful upgrades to everyday life that the current AI boom can deliver.