Four Reasons every Chief of Staff Needs to Lean into Generative AI in 2024

So the sun just came up on 2024, and I suspect every Chief of Staff out there is chomping at the bit to put a breakout year on the books, elevating their principal, elevating their org, and advancing their career.

If you ask yourself honestly, how will 2024 be better and more productive than 2023, I think you have to start with the usual suspects; unlocking your principal to have more time to move the dial, tighter execution on strategic plans, breaking down knowledge silos, and really dialing in the operating cadence of your org.

But this is all incremental, Chief of Staff stuff. ? You were likely doing a pretty good job in 2023, and while you can certainly optimize here and there, every Chief should be scanning the horizon for step function level improvements in execution, productivity, and output.

Well, the 3x productivity jump is in reach, today.??

Multiple LLM’s such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Bard, and a host of open source providers have exposed APIs and enabled applications that can drive efficiency gains across the board.? Does your company need to code faster?? Write more content?? Better handle your customer requests?? Write more proposals?? Answer employee questions?? Generative AI is already ready to help every department juice productivity.

But somebody needs to unleash these new generative AI superpowers across YOUR organization, and it won’t be easy; there are information security issues to navigate, and behaviors to change (not to mention a wave of new applications to vet).

Here are four reasons that spearheading Generative AI efforts need to be on the top of every Chief of Staff’s list for 2024.

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1) If Not You, Who?

You are the Queen / King of? special projects; the board-level projects for which there are no other executives capable to pull off and the projects that can make or break the year.

There is a reason that The Chief is referred to as a Force Multiplier - part of the job description is to find the unlock for the true step change improvements.

This is that moment.

2) Significantly Juice Productivity

I was speaking recently to a Chief at a company that, by any objective measure, was crushing it.? They had just raised a huge Series B in a tough funding environment, and were 4x-ing year over year.

But this Chief was not sleeping well.? During the pandemic, his company had gone remote, and he was worried that they did not yet have their operating execution truly dialed in; specifically, he was worried that an in-person up and comer competitor with a maniac CEO, driving 12 hour days, was simply going to out grind them.

For him, from an org wide perspective, harnessing AI is a way to substantially increase throughput and efficiency, without increasing costs.? It is a way for his 100 person team to do the work of 400.

From a Chief of Staff role perspective, he believed that AI can help him be everywhere, all at once, and make sure that people were doing what they said they were going to do.

Moving quickly on Gen AI is his answer for a hard charging and motivated competitor, and he was starting with how work gets done; specifically using AI to introduce better meeting hygiene and tighter "Next Step" execution.

3) Generative AI is already REALLY Good at the CoS Workflows

In my research and conversations with more than 130 Chiefs of Staff, it quickly became clear that the critical skills for any Chief include the ability to connect the dots across an organization, to summarize complex information across large datasets, to extract action and distribute action items and decisions from staff meetings, and to essentially be the knowledge base for the C Suite.

Gen AI is already ELITE at each of these workflows.??

Even if your org is not yet ready to deploy AI at scale, every Chief should be augmenting their toolset with AI capabilities.

4) Your Career Will Thank You Later for the Generative AI Skills You Learn Today

We are at that rare moment in the technology cycle where the most experienced users of the application layer of Generative AI only have a year of experience (though the foundational work has been happening for decades).??

One thing I’ve learned after 20 years in Silicon Valley, is if that tide is rising quickly, get your boat in the water.??

The skills you learn in 2024 in how to harness Generative AI to influence the rhythm of business will put you in Super Chief territory, and will chart your career path for years to come.

Chiefs, this is your career defining moment.? How are you taking the lead to bring generative AI to your organization in 2024?

In a future blog post, I will share a few tips on how my company did it, and how you might get started bringing your org into the age of Generative AI.

Lawrence Coburn is the co-founder of Ambient, an AI assistant purpose built for the Chief of Staff.