Case Study: Adelle Archer | Build Your AI Chief of Staff in 48 Hours

Full video transcript

It’s remarkable that in a day and a half, you can get from “I’ve never used co-work before” to “oh my gosh, my morning briefing, my email triage, my comms engine” — all of that is fully built, and I could literally be using it on Monday morning. That’s insane. That’s probably 25% of your week that just got automated in a day and a half. Just crazy.

What a time to be alive. It’s really exciting, because you’re like, okay, now if I go do that for all my team again, how much time can I save everybody so that we can be highest and best. My name is Adelle Archer and I’m the co-founder and CEO of Vermana. What we do is we honor remarkable people and pets when they pass away by making real diamonds from the carbon in their ashes or hair.

What is the state of your business with AI right now?

I would say we’re pretty AI forward. My co-founder and I have been early adopters of AI and just championing it across our whole team, working to make Claude more accessible to team members, creating custom projects that they can interact with. We’ve just really encouraged everybody to get smarter and to amplify themselves with AI and not be fearful of it. So I think as a team we’ve adopted it really well.

How do you think about AI as a CEO when it comes to human team members and AI agents coming together for that agentic workforce?

I think AI is going to empower us to do our highest and best, and that’s what excites me the most. I’ve been spending a lot of time with my sales team right now and just obsessing over everything that’s just not a good use of their time. As humans we have incredible relational value we can bring, but we have limited amounts of energy. So if 50% of your day as a salesperson is doing administrative stuff, that really is taking away from the incredible juice and value-add you can bring when interacting with customers and going deep with them and building value. So that’s what agents are for. They could be filling out the CRM, automating processes, even doing some thinking behind the scenes on what’s the best next use of my time so you’re not context switching as much. That kind of thinking applies to every area of the organization. So I think it’s really just freeing people up to be able to add the most amount of value and not be drained and burned out by the end of a workday.

And what was the use case that you came into this weekend thinking about?

I got to solve for myself, because I tend to typically go and solve problems for my team and look at how I can make them more effective. I think this weekend was really good to take a step back and say how do I scale myself better, and have good systems in place so I’m not burning all the candles at all the ends and doing all the things just because I can. So it was really architecting a chief of staff that can automate a lot of aspects of staying on top of things — designing a morning brief that comes in dialed to my priorities and what I care about, what is the highest and best use of my time that day, that week, what I need to have on my radar, what I need to hold other people accountable to. Building a whole email inbox triage process. Building a whole architecture around what is going to be stored for me personally versus what can be exposed to the team and be usable context files that formulate our knowledge base going forward. And then a comms engine that is pre-drafting emails, Slack messages, things that I can go in and get to a place that my workflows are like good, good, good, send, send, send, versus all the manual thinking and drafting you used to have to do.

So, over the course of two days, what do you feel that you accomplished?

I got all that architecture set up for the chief of staff. That whole groundwork is laid. The only last piece I’m going to go build is some automations around project management and task management. But it’s remarkable that in a day and a half you can get from “I’ve never used co-work before” to “oh my gosh, my morning briefing, my email triage, my comms engine” — all of that is fully built, and I could literally be using it on Monday morning. That’s insane. That’s probably 25% of your week that just got automated in a day and a half, which is crazy.

What a time to be alive. It’s really exciting, because you’re like, okay, now if I go do that for all my team again, how much time can I save everybody so that we can be highest and best.

What was the unlock for you? Was it the community around you? Was it the pre-made skills or other things that I’m not thinking of?

What I love about doing in person is that you are knowledge sharing. You’re able to have sidebars with people. I was hitting a block on the Gmail MCP — wasn’t able to do certain things I needed it to. And then Jason’s like, “Oh, well, just use a Google Apps Script, here’s how I’ve set that up.” So it’s those little tidbits sometimes of hearing what somebody else has done and their best practices. And then obviously Darby’s right there that you can say, “Hey, here’s where I’m hitting a roadblock.” So that was very helpful for me personally. I’m probably more of a technical founder that likes to get my hands dirty and build things. I think for other people, it’s probably just having that handheld step-by-step process. I do love that there’s kind of a prepackage and then I can tailor and build from there. I want to do more of these things where you’re in a room with each other, not just in a room by yourself trying to figure it out.

So, there are other founders out there that are like you and they are maybe tinkering with AI, maybe they’re even like you were last week. What advice do you have for them to accelerate their path of using AI?

I’m just a huge believer, and I’ve always been, even before AI, that you find who is really good at this thing that I’m trying to learn and how do I go learn from them and shortcut my own learning. For sure you can figure things out on your own and you can do it DIY, but you always will get something out of spending time around somebody else who’s really good at that thing or further down the path. So that would just be my advice — why learn it in a silo? If you go and you get to be around other builders, it’s going to open your mind a lot. I was going deep down and had very detailed projects in Claude chat, and I just hadn’t been inspired yet, or catalyzed into looking at co-work, and just in the last day and a half I’m like, what have I been doing? I should not be doing all these things in chat, they definitely should be co-work. And I just unlocked this whole new possibility. I probably wouldn’t have prioritized on my own going to watch the YouTube on Claude Code, but it was because I was in this community of people doing it together that it’s like step function better.

Thank you so much, Adelle. That’s all the questions I have for you. Awesome. Thank you guys.