Your AI Executive Assistant Starts Here

Every morning I wake up and do the same thing. Check email, scroll through a few newsletters, skim LinkedIn, open my calendar, try to piece together what my day looks like. It takes me 20-30 minutes and a full cup of coffee.

This week, we're going to get AI to do that for us. Welcome to your first tiny AI lab challenge.

As a reminder, the tiny AI lab will send you a weekly experiment. Something you can do in a couple of hours to get you playing around with AI. My hope is each challenge can serve as a starting point for you to take it wherever is most helpful for your day to day.

The Challenge:

This week, you're building a personalized morning briefing assistant. We will start with an AI workflow that pulls together the news, updates, and information you actually care about and delivers it to you every morning.

Depending on the tool you're using, you may even be able to have it push the briefing directly to you as a notification no extra setup needed. If your tool does not enable direct notifications i.e. Claude, you can ask in your prompt the best way to get this delivered to you every morning - the tool will prompt you to set up automations using Zapier or Make and be able to give you step by step instructions. 

The prompt to get you started

Drop this into your AI tool of choice and edit it to fit your preferences:

"You are my personal morning briefing assistant. Every morning at [X am], I want a briefing tailored to my role and interests. I work in [your industry/role] and I'm currently tracking [specific topics, trends, or projects]. My personal interests include [interests]. Sources I trust and check regularly include [your go-to news outlets, newsletters, content creators, podcasts, etc.]. Format the briefing as a quick-scan summary I can read in under 2 minutes. Lead with anything time-sensitive or that I'd need to know before my first meeting. Group the rest by topic. Skip anything generic — I only want things that are directly relevant to what I listed above. Start by creating today's briefing based on what you know. After I review it, I'll tell you what to add, remove, or adjust — and then we'll set it up to be delivered every morning."

Customize the prompt based on your interests and see what you get. Then work with your chatbot to tweak it to make it more helpful for you.

Too easy?

Ask your AI to pull in your calendar and email.

Once you've got your briefing working, or if you already have a briefing, you can connect your calendar or email and use the following prompt to get a summary of your day and your most relevant emails added to your daily brief. Note: this prompt assumes you don't already have apps connected.

"I'd like to add my calendar and email to my morning briefing. First, walk me through step-by-step how to connect my calendar and email to this tool. Once they're connected, update my daily briefing to include: a summary of today's meetings with who's attending and any context I should review beforehand, any scheduling conflicts or tight turnarounds between meetings, and a short list of overnight emails that need a response or a decision from me. Flag anything that looks time-sensitive based on the sender, subject line, or keywords — and ask me if you got the priority right so you can learn my preferences over time."

Why this matters?

This kind of workflow is already reshaping how people work - instead of waking up to a blank slate you can wake up to a prepared summary of things most relevant to you and the work you missed while you were out of the office. Anyone whose job involves synthesizing information and staying current is watching AI step into the task of summarizing, prioritizing, and highlighting relevant information. The more you engage with your daily summary the more the AI tool can learn about what is important to you - making it a more helpful co-worker.

You can use this exact same approach to give you background information on all of the people you have meetings with on a specific day. Or if your meetings are in different locations throughout the day you can ask it to figure out where you should get lunch every day based on your schedule. Summarize the newsletter folder in your inbox as a voice note. Get a weekly digest of industry news tailored to a project you're working on.

That’s it for this week.

Once you are done - reply to this email and let me know how it went!

Did you get your briefing set up? What tool did you use? What surprised you? Where did you get stuck?

I read every response, and your experiments help me make these challenges better for everyone.