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Episode 3 of 8 · 5 min read

What an agent does for a CEO

Which part of a leader's work an agent can take on, what stays yours, and how an ordinary week changes.

Context

A chief executive rarely runs out of work. They run out of time. Between the nine o'clock meeting, the month-end close and the call with an unhappy client, a big share of the day goes to gathering information instead of deciding. You open three reports, ask finance for a figure, dig up the email where someone promised a delivery. None of that is leading. It is preparing the ground for leading.

An AI agent is a program that receives an assignment, consults the sources you have allowed it to consult, takes several steps on its own and hands you a result. It runs on a language model, the same technology behind chat assistants, but connected to your work tools.

The core idea

The agent takes preparation and follow-up. You keep the judgment. A practical rule: if the task is about gathering, organizing, comparing or remembering, it is a candidate for an agent. If it is about deciding, negotiating or sustaining a relationship, it is yours.

Work an agent can take on, always within the sources and permissions you define:

  • Morning summary. Before you arrive, it reads your email, your calendar and yesterday's reports, and leaves you one page with what changed and what needs your attention.
  • Figures on demand. Instead of asking someone to build a report, you ask how much was invoiced this week or which clients are more than thirty days overdue, and you get the answer with the source of each number.
  • Meeting preparation. It pulls together the agreements from the last meeting, the open items and the numbers about to be discussed.
  • Commitment tracking. It spots what someone promised in an email or a meeting and warns you when a date is close or has passed with no movement.

What stays yours:

  • Deciding. The agent can lay out the options in order. Choosing one and carrying the consequences is your job.
  • Negotiating. A price, a deadline or a concession is discussed face to face, reading the room, with your signature on it.
  • Relationships with people. Congratulating, correcting, convincing a client to stay, giving your team bad news. That is not delegated to a program.

There is one honest condition. Agents make mistakes. They can misread a column, pick up an old figure or summarize with the wrong emphasis. Their work is reviewed like that of any new colleague, and the more important the decision, the more careful the review. That is why the agent should always say where each figure came from.

The agent multiplies your reach and your team's. If it works, your attention reaches the decision with the material already assembled, and your people can spend more hours on what only they know how to do.

How it is done

Getting started is simpler than it looks.

  1. Write down one real week of your calendar. Mark every block where you gathered information instead of deciding.
  2. Pick one repetitive task with clear inputs, such as the morning summary.
  3. Define which sources the agent may read and what it may not do without asking you. Sending an email to a client or moving money should stay off limits until you decide otherwise.
  4. Ask that every figure come with its source and its date.
  5. Check closely for the first few weeks. Once you trust it, move to spot checks.
  6. Add a second task only when the first one works well.

Anyone who installs agents in companies, as Omni Agent does, starts right there: a Discovery phase that maps where the leadership's time goes before building anything.

An illustrative case

Imagine the CEO of a construction materials distributor. The company and the person are invented, and so are the figures in the example.

Her week without an agent. On Monday she spends the first hour building the sales dashboard for the meeting by hand. On Tuesday she chases purchasing to find out how much she owes her three main suppliers. On Wednesday she forgets she promised a large client an answer about discounts. On Thursday she goes into a negotiation with a supplier without the history of late deliveries at hand. On Friday she reviews her pending items from memory.

Her week with an agent. On Monday at seven thirty she gets a half-page summary with three issues. Before the meeting a document arrives with the earlier agreements, the open items and the week's sales. On Wednesday the agent warns her that the commitment to the large client has gone five days without movement. On Thursday she walks into the negotiation with the late-delivery history in hand. On Friday she reviews a list of commitments with dates and owners.

There is also a mistake. One day the agent takes a collections figure from an outdated report. She catches it because the summary cites the source with its date, corrects it and adjusts the assignment so it always uses the latest report.

Notice what changes. The CEO still negotiates, decides and calls the large client. What disappeared was the legwork. Those hours went to visiting clients and to a hard conversation with a manager who had been waiting for her.

Takeaways

  • An agent takes preparation and follow-up: summarizing, calculating, assembling, remembering.
  • Deciding, negotiating and caring for your relationship with your people remain yours.
  • Agents make mistakes. Review them like a new colleague and require them to cite their sources.
  • Start with one repetitive task that has clear inputs and limited permissions.
  • To know whether it works, look at your calendar. If the time spent gathering data now goes to conversation and decisions, the agent is doing its job.