How to Build Your Own AI Assistant

Set up a custom AI assistant and make it consistently useful for your role.

Before You Start

Goal: Understand how to set up a custom AI assistant and add the context, preferences, and documents that would make it consistently useful for your role.

Watch: How to Build Your Own AI Assistant — Members are encouraged to watch beforehand, but a quick recap at the meeting works too.

Meeting Agenda · Approx. 60 mins

  • Member Updates · 10 mins
  • Icebreaker · 10 mins
  • Activities · 20 mins
  • One Action · 10 mins
  • Wrap-Up · 5 mins

👋 Member Updates · 10 mins

Go around your Circle and share personal updates. Keep them brief and focused on significant changes or important decisions since the last time you met. It's OK not to have one every month. If you have a One Action update from last time, share that too.

🧊 Icebreaker · 10 mins

Invite everyone in the group to share. Keep answers to one or two minutes per person.

What's something you find yourself re-explaining over and over — to a new colleague, a vendor, or to AI — that you wish you only had to say once?

🏋️ Activity · 10 mins

Setting up your AI assistant

Write down your responses to the following questions. You can add these prompts when setting up your AI assistant later.

Note: You can build your assistant as an individual project or custom GPT. Or, if you want these instructions to apply to all your projects or GPTs, you can add the to the global settings in your AI tools.

  • What do you do, who do you serve, and what does good work looks like in your context?

  • What are your communication preferences? (E.g. the tone you write in, the formats you prefer, and the things you always want it to do or never want it to do.)

  • What's your audience, or audiences? What do they care about?

  • Which documents would you upload? (E.g. style guides, templates, briefing documents.)

Discuss as a group and learn from each other:

  1. What does good work look like in your context? How would you define that for AI?
  2. What do you always want AI to do, or never want AI to do?

🏋️ Activity · 10 mins

Use AI to help prioritize your work:

  1. Share your to-do list for the week with AI and ask it to help you prioritize and map out a realistic schedule. The more context, the better: for example, it will provide better answers if it has access to your calendar, email, and/or longer-term goals.
  2. Discuss as a group: Did the AI provide helpful results? Did they make sense, given your goals and priorities? What further context could you provide to improve the output?

🎯 One Action · 10 mins

Commit to one concrete action — big or small — you'll take before next meeting. Go around the Circle and share (1 minute or less per member). Vocalizing it helps hold each other accountable.

Set up your AI assistant this week. Come to the next meeting prepared to share what changed and how it helped.

📅 Wrap-Up · 5 mins

Before you break, plan your next meeting and close on an energetic note. Go around your Circle one by one and finish the sentence:

Now I am feeling… (choose one word).

  • Set the day, time, and location
  • Choose the next topic or resource
  • Confirm who's leading the discussion
  • Decide how you'll stay in touch in between