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What is a chief of staff agent?
A chief of staff agent is an AI agent that coordinates rather than does a single task: it oversees other agents or tools, keeps the whole picture, filters the noise, and surfaces only what needs a human. In Foundry, the chief-of-staff (master) agent reads the findings of every specialist agent watching your stack and delivers one prioritized daily briefing.
A chief of staff agent is an AI agent that coordinates rather than does a single task: it oversees other agents or tools, keeps the whole picture, filters the noise, and surfaces only what needs a human. In Foundry, the chief-of-staff (master) agent reads the findings of every specialist agent watching your stack and delivers one prioritized daily briefing.
The name is borrowed from the human role. A chief of staff to a founder doesn't own one function — they hold context across everything, decide what deserves attention, and protect the principal's focus. A chief of staff agent does the same job in software.
That makes it different from a task agent (which completes one job) and from an assistant (which answers when asked). A chief of staff agent works proactively and continuously, across many sources, and comes to you with a synthesis.
In practice it sits at the top of a small hierarchy: specialist agents each watch one tool and report structured findings, and the chief of staff weighs all of them into a single, ranked summary.
FAQ
- Is a chief of staff agent the same as an AI assistant?
- No. An assistant is reactive — it responds to prompts. A chief of staff agent is proactive and coordinating: it monitors many things at once and decides what to surface, without being asked each time.
- Does a chief of staff agent take actions?
- It can, depending on the product, but its defining job is coordination and synthesis. In Foundry today the chief of staff reads and briefs; the specialists it coordinates are monitoring agents.
See it working in Foundry.
Connect your stack and get one briefing a day.
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