A good chief of staff remembers what was decided and promised across everything you run, and tells you what's still open before it becomes a problem. Most founders running a few projects at once don't have one, so plenty of them try to build one out of ChatGPT or Claude.
This guide covers what that homemade version gets right, where it breaks, and how to give it a memory that keeps up with your week.
What people build and call an AI chief of staff
The usual recipe is a Claude project with a long instruction file. The file says who you are, what each project is, how you like updates written and what to check at the start of each week. Then you paste in meeting notes, the odd email and a summary of where things stand, and ask it to help you plan.
For the first week or two it works well. The drafts sound like you, and it seems to know your projects.
Where the homemade version breaks
It only knows what you pasted in. The client's message, the thread with your designer, the decision you made on a call: none of it reaches the project unless you copy it over, and on a busy week you won't.
It also lives in one tool. Open ChatGPT on your phone between meetings and it has never heard of your Claude project. Anything you decide there stays there.
The instruction file goes out of date as well. You wrote it on a quiet afternoon, and three weeks later the launch has moved and a client has changed their mind, while the file still describes the old plan. Keeping it current is a job, and it lands on you. Every one of these is a memory problem, and remembering is most of what a chief of staff is for.
The job is remembering and reporting
Most of a chief of staff's week goes on two things: keeping track of what was decided and promised across every project, and telling you what's still open. The following up and the hard conversations stay with you.
New Brain is your digital brain for work: everything you read, said and decided, across every project, and every answer shows where it came from. ChatGPT, Claude and your other AI tools work from it too. It takes on the remembering and the reporting, and you keep the following up.
Here's one week. Your meeting notes say the client will send the final feature list by Wednesday. You save them once and it lands in that client's project. An email confirms that website pricing stays at $49. In a ChatGPT chat you agree the launch moves to April, and ChatGPT saves it. And in a ChatGPT chat you notice that nobody knows who signs the Acme contract, so you save that question too.
Later, in whichever tool you have open, you ask "when do we launch?" and get "April", with "From ChatGPT, 3 Nov" under it. You didn't paste anything into a project, and it doesn't matter which tool you saved it from.
The Friday digest and the morning catch-up
Every Friday, New Brain writes a digest for each project: what was decided, what changed and the open questions. It's the note a chief of staff would leave you before the weekend, and it covers the projects where something happened that week or a question is still open.
Each weekday morning there's a shorter catch-up on where you left off. In the middle of the week you can also ask any connected AI tool "where were we on Acme?" and get the same kind of catch-up for that one project. Both the digest and the morning summary are Automatic updates, and you turn them on in Settings.
New Brain also watches for the problems you'd otherwise find too late. If two things in your brain don't match, say one note has the launch in March and another in April, it tells you. If a fact is more than 90 days old and its sources no longer back it up, it flags it. Nothing is overwritten: when the launch moves, the old date stays, marked as replaced, so you can see what changed and when. When an AI tool picks up something it isn't sure about, it waits in To check, and you choose Keep, Fix or Remove.
Set it up
- Bring your history. In New Brain, choose Add, open the Chat history tab, and pick the export file from ChatGPT or Claude. Your brain starts from the work you've already talked through.
- Connect your AI tools. In Claude, add New Brain from the Connectors screen. In ChatGPT, add it from the Plugins screen; ChatGPT will ask you to confirm each save. The full steps are on the Connections page.
- Move your instruction file. Put who you are in About you, and the way you like things done, such as how you write a client update, in Saved instructions. Every connected AI tool follows them, so you stop keeping a copy in each one.
- Turn on Automatic updates in Settings for the Friday digest and the morning summary, then save things as they happen.
What New Brain won't do
- It doesn't act for you. New Brain won't send the email, file the ticket or change anything in your other apps. It remembers and reports, and the following up is yours.
- It keeps no separate list of promises and due dates. A promise is saved like any other message, and you find it by asking, as with the launch date above.
- It only knows what reaches it. A decision you never save, and that no connected app brings in, isn't in your brain, so it won't show up in an answer or a digest.
New Brain is in early access, and you can ask for a place below.