It’s not a mystery… I can tell you what I do most days, and probably 80% of it is communication. An AI could do that. That communication is to learn what is going on up, down, and across the org. I mostly want to make sure we aren’t doing redundant work — though sometimes that is useful, and making sure timelines aren’t slipping. Oh, and dealing with conflicts.

The other 20% is writing: policies, SOPs, audits, grants, performance reviews, etc.

I could probably automate over half my job in n8n in a weekend… hmm… actually might try that.

I’m in a heavily-regulated sector, fully remote. If left alone, our junior exec:

- needs a digest of where chat activity is hottest. Maybe he lurks, occasionally he gets into conversations about what’s going on in another department.

- needs some warning if the Microsoft systems are under attack or strain. The Linux systems have not needed attention; the jargon is unfamiliar.

- occasionally brings up hypothetical radical changes in strategy. I think of these as multivariate tests. Maybe I reply, “Plenty of Kubenetes developers available right now” might communicate that some small team would be ahead of us on some solved problem.

I’m surprised that:

- he has no concern that competition even exists. No awareness that our competition demos at conferences; why they’d choose to spend time that way.

- no interest in the big accounts we don’t have. If it would take a big lift, what would engineering need? If it would take a small lift, what non-engineering is blocking? No interest.

- person-to-person networking is effective at all. I just can’t imagine any value in two execs meeting without hours of preparation.

I’ve seen BI tooling around each of these. I wonder if a daily “facts of our department” slide to begin each meeting, if that would replace/augment 51% of visible exec.