An AI chief of staff for small firms and founders

Chief of staff and executive assistant are different jobs

An executive assistant runs your time: the inbox, the calendar, the travel, the logistics. A chief of staff runs your commitments: what you promised, what you are waiting on, what you need to know before a decision, and what is quietly going wrong. In a large company these are two people. In a small one they are both you, late at night.

The reason the distinction matters when you are choosing software is that most tools only do the first job. They schedule and summarize. The second job needs something that remembers across weeks, notices silence, and brings things to you unprompted.

What an AI chief of staff actually does

Stripped of the title, the work is five habits. Each one is something a good human chief of staff does without being asked.

• Keeps the list of what you owe people and what people owe you, built from your own email, and tells you when something has gone quiet.
• Prepares you for every meeting: who is in the room, what was said last time, and what they are likely to ask for.
• Briefs you each morning on the few things that need a decision, so the day starts on priorities and not on sorting.
• Drafts the routine writing in your voice: the follow-up, the intro, the polite no, the weekly update.
• Protects your time: proposes what to move, what to decline, and where the thinking time goes.

What it cannot do, and should not pretend to

A human chief of staff also reads the room, carries messages nobody wants to put in writing, and tells you when you are wrong. Software does none of that. It does not manage your team, run your board process, or make judgment calls about people. Anyone selling an AI that replaces a senior operator is overselling.

What it replaces is the administrative half of the role, which is the half that gets dropped first when you are busy. For a founder or a principal with no chief of staff at all, that half is most of the value.

Why it works by text

The people who need this most are the ones with the least desk time. A principal moving between client sites, a founder in back-to-back calls, an advisor between agency meetings. They will not open another dashboard. They will answer a text.

Aura has its own name and phone number, so it shows up as a contact. You text it the way you would text a chief of staff, in fragments, between meetings. On Pro and Max plans you can also call the same number and talk it through from the car.

How Aura does it

Aura connects to your Google Workspace accounts and works across them as one desk. It reads what comes in, tracks the follow-ups in both directions, prepares context before meetings, and sends a morning brief. When it thinks something needs you, it texts first. When it wants to send, schedule, or share, it asks, and the approval is logged.

The morning brief is on every plan. Unprompted follow-up and meeting-prep nudges start on Plus at $99 a month, and phone calls on Pro at $199. On Basic, Aura covers follow-ups in the brief and whenever you ask.

It also remembers. Tell it once that the option-year renewal is the most important thing this quarter, or that a particular client always gets a same-day reply, and it carries that forward.

Crux Advisory, a government advisory firm, runs a branded assistant named Pepper. Pepper sends the morning brief, holds the calendar across offices, and closes the loop on deliverables, logging each one and setting the next check-in. The principal texts Pepper the way he would text a chief of staff.

When to hire a person instead

If you run a leadership team and spend your week on cross-functional decisions, you need a human chief of staff and an AI one will not substitute. For most small firms the order is the other way round: start with the AI, learn what you actually hand off, and hire the person when the judgment work, not the administrative work, is what is overflowing.