During a CEO Pulse meeting on building an AI chief of staff, Sally Slater, Co-founder and Managing Partner of InnovAItion Partners, expanded on what she calls an agency brain: a connected system of organizational knowledge that gives both people and AI the context they need to make better decisions. Here are four observations from the conversation that are worth considering.
1. Agencies should work to connect their institutional knowledge.
Agencies generate an extraordinary amount of information. Client strategies, research, media plans, meeting notes, proposals, Slack conversations, playbooks, competitive intelligence—the list goes on. What’s often missing is the connective tissue.
When someone asks, “Have we solved a similar problem before?” or “Why did we make that recommendation six months ago?” the answer frequently depends on who happens to remember. Institutional knowledge lives in inboxes, shared drives, project management platforms, and, perhaps most importantly, in people’s heads.
AI can only work with the context it’s given. If knowledge is fragmented, AI simply reflects that fragmentation. If knowledge is connected, AI becomes significantly more useful.
2. An agency brain is more than a repository.
It’s tempting to think this is simply another name for a knowledge management system. Sally described an agency brain as a living system that understands which clients are top of mind, how priorities change, who has expertise in what, what conversations have already happened, and how information evolves over time.
As she noted, organizations often ask individuals to manually keep knowledge current. In practice, that rarely happens consistently. The goal instead is to build systems that continuously capture and organize context, so organizational memory improves rather than deteriorates.
3. Executive judgment still matters, but AI should understand how you make decisions.
A CEO questioned whether AI could ever understand the nuance behind executive prioritization. Sally acknowledged that AI doesn’t inherently know why one client suddenly takes precedence over another or why a seemingly routine issue becomes strategically important.
She recommended having AI interview you about how you prioritize work, what factors influence your decisions, and what causes priorities to shift. Over time, that guidance becomes another layer of organizational context.
4. The value lies in reducing unnecessary cognitive load.
Morning briefings can surface the day’s priorities. Automated follow-ups can help move the needle on outstanding requests. Project information can be neatly assembled before work begins. Together, these things allow leaders to spend more time focusing on high-value work and feed into a system that ultimately remembers important commitments and engagements.
So, what exactly is an AI Chief of Staff?
Depending on who you ask, the term can mean anything from a single AI agent to an entire ecosystem of tools. Sally’s own definition was much broader. Rather than imagining AI as a chatbot waiting for instructions, she described it as a system of routines, automations, shared knowledge, and specialized agents working together to reduce cognitive load and support better decisions.
Have you moved beyond using AI as an occasional assistant? Are you beginning to connect knowledge across your organization? Are you creating systems that help your teams prioritize, retain context, and continuously improve? As Sally reminded the group, there are practical steps agencies can take today, and more sophisticated capabilities that will come over time.
