Principal Assistant
The Principal Assistant is a chief of staff for the head of your agency. It sorts the principal's Gmail inbox and reports on it in the daily brief, flags urgent mail, turns meeting transcripts into action items, and keeps a journal of decisions.
It does not write or send email replies. Reply drafts for the connected mailbox come from Account Assistant, and each one waits for a person to approve it. You work with the Principal Assistant in two places: its Slack channel, where escalation cards and meeting summaries arrive, and the app, on the Inbox and Meeting Intel pages.
What It Does
The daily brief reaches the principal by email and Slack direct message at 8:00 am and 4:00 pm each weekday, alongside the rest of the team. The assistant checks Gmail about every two and a half minutes. Each new message is sorted into one of the labels your agency has set up. Mail that shows cancellation risk, a revenue opportunity or sensitive language raises an escalation card in the assistant's channel. The assistant writes no reply drafts.
Mail that is spam, marketing or a cold pitch is moved out of the inbox into your review label, set on the Inbox Triage screen, when triage is set to move mail there. Nothing is deleted, so you can look through it and move anything back. When you move a sender's mail from one label to another twice, the assistant learns the correction. Rules it learns for archiving mail are only proposed to you; they do not apply on their own. Mail from your own agency's domain is left alone.
Meeting transcripts from your connected meeting service are picked up every 15 minutes. For each one the assistant extracts action items, posts a summary card, and lists the meeting on the Meeting Intel page, where you can turn it into a blog or LinkedIn draft.
Decisions go into a decision journal. You add one with the decision command in Slack and search the journal with the decisions command. See Commands.
Key Capabilities
| Capability | What it gives you |
|---|---|
| Daily brief | The team's brief, by email and Slack direct message at 8:00 am and 4:00 pm each weekday: your day, threads awaiting a reply (the principal only), tasks over budget, overdue SLAs, clients at risk and stalled deals in the morning; pipeline pulse, time tracked, dormant prospects and draft posts in the afternoon |
| Inbox triage | New mail sorted into the labels your agency set up, with spam, marketing and cold pitches held in a review label |
| Inbox Triage section | What triage filed and what it was unsure about, in the principal's morning brief |
| Meeting intelligence | A summary card and action items for each meeting transcript |
| Meeting Intel page | Action items split into On Your Plate and Team, with Promote to Blog and Promote to LinkedIn |
| Decision journal | A searchable record of decisions you log in Slack |
| Escalation card | A card for an email that shows cancellation risk, a revenue opportunity or sensitive language, posted to the assistant's channel when the principal has this notification turned on |
The Approval Rule
The assistant sorts mail, reports on it in the brief, posts escalation cards and summarizes meetings without asking. When triage is set to move mail, it moves spam, marketing and cold pitches into your review label on its own, and it logs action items from meetings. It never deletes mail.
It writes no reply drafts and never replies to anyone. Replies to the principal's mail are drafted by Account Assistant, and a person approves each one before it is sent. The one email it can send on its own is a forward of mail it sorts as a receipt to your bookkeeping address, and only when your agency has set one up.
Promoting a meeting to a blog or LinkedIn post creates a draft in the content or social approval queue. Nothing publishes until it is approved there.
The daily brief arrives on a schedule. You cannot ask the Principal Assistant for it in Slack, and it does not answer "morning brief" or "prep for my 2 pm call". Pre-meeting prep comes from the Meeting Assistant.
Who It's For
- Agency owner or managing partner: a daily operating picture without assembling it yourself
- Anyone fielding high email volume: a sorted inbox, a triage report in the morning brief and a card for the mail that cannot wait
- Anyone on back-to-back calls: summaries and action items without manual notes
- Anyone making frequent decisions: a searchable record of what was decided
Related
- Commands: the two Slack commands and the approval buttons
- Examples: walkthroughs of the most common workflows
- Notifications: every card and message it posts
- Schedule: when it acts on its own
- Troubleshooting: common questions and what to check
- Inbox and Meeting Intel: the app pages
- Work Queue: every draft and decision waiting on you
- Inbox Triage: how mail sorting is set up in the Operator Console