An Easy Guide to Creating a Custom AI Assistant

Could you tell someone, with any precision, where your time actually went this week?

We couldn’t. And most business owners couldn’t. We call it the CEO blind spot: You’re moving so fast that you lose visibility into your calendar, your commitments, and your priorities.

That’s why we built an AI system to solve this. It gives us clarity about our time, and ensures that we don’t forget important things.

Here Are The Tools We Used

Claude: Anthropic’s AI serves as the brain of the operation.

Native connectors: Inside Claude’s settings, we toggled on the direct connections for our Gmail, Slack, and Google Calendar.

Meeting transcription: Our AI note-taker transcribes calls, and we export key call transcripts into our Claude Project.

Project instructions: We created a dedicated workspace in Claude with background context about who we are, what our company does, and how our weeks should ideally be structured.

The connectivity here is important. Without the Claude integrations, you’d have to manually paste in your calendar, copy Slack threads, forward emails, and upload transcripts — which is way too tedious.

The good news is that connecting these tools is not a technical exercise. If you can toggle a switch in your settings, you can do it. Claude even walks you through it.

Once you have the connections set up, you just give it one simple prompt. Here’s the exact language we give it every week:

You are my executive chief of staff. Review my connected Google Calendar, Gmail, Slack messages, and the provided call transcripts for the past five days. Generate a “Weekly Executive Debrief” with the following sections:

1. Time allocation: Estimate the percentage of time I spent on sales, client delivery, ops, and admin.
2. Big wins and stalls: What moved the needle this week? What got blocked or delayed?
3. Action item audit: List every commitment I made to others and others made to me, across all channels.
4. Next week’s forecast: Look at my upcoming calendar and flag any heavy meeting days, conflicting priorities, or prep work I need to do this weekend. Be direct, highly structured, and objective.

What comes back is a detailed report that reads like a chief of staff briefing. It is categorized, skimmable, and highly specific. 

The time estimates are accurate enough to be genuinely useful. The forecast section catches commitments we forgot about and flags weeks that are about to get heavy.

This report is now a core part of our weekly workflow. And once you build it yourself, we suspect it’ll become a core part of yours.