When people talk about AI at work, the conversation still tends to start with writing. Draft this email. Summarize that document. Clean up this proposal.
Those things are useful. But as a CEO, writing isn't my bottleneck. Visibility is.
On any given day, I'm making commitments in Teams chats, agreeing to next steps in meetings, and asking for updates over email. My team is doing the same with me. Individually, those commitments seem small. Collectively, they're how a company gets things done.
They're also remarkably easy to lose.
Over the last month, I've changed how I use Microsoft 365 Copilot and Cowork. I'm using them less to create content and more to help me run the business.
Here's what that looks like.
My Daily Executive Summary
The most valuable workflow I've built is a daily executive summary that Cowork creates for me every morning. It reviews my email, Teams chats, and meeting notes and answers a few straightforward questions:
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What commitments have I made?
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What commitments have others made to me?
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What's the status of each one?
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What came up in meetings that I need to know about?
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What needs my attention today?
It also maintains a running tracker. When someone follows up or closes the loop in a conversation, Cowork connects that update to the open item. When something goes quiet, it stays visible.
The setup was simple. I wrote the prompt once, scheduled it to run every morning at 7:00 AM, and had it email me the report. But I added an important constraint: only report items supported by an actual message, meeting, or tracker entry. Don't guess. Don't invent tasks. And if you can't access something, tell me.
That matters because an executive summary is only valuable if I can trust what's in it.
What surprised me was how well it connected conversations back to open commitments. Within a day, I was telling my team it was helping me more than almost anything else I'd tried with AI.
Hearing What Happens in Meetings I Don't Attend
The part of the brief I've come to rely on most is what it tells me about meetings I follow but don't attend.
There are plenty of them: customer project meetings, operations meetings, pipeline reviews, marketing strategy sessions. I want visibility into what's happening, but I can't—and shouldn't—sit in every meeting. My team needs room to run their areas without the CEO in the room.
Cowork gives me another option.
It reviews the available meeting notes and surfaces what might actually require my attention. I don't need another recap of everything that was said. I need the signal.
Sometimes that's operational. A delivery team mentions projects stacking up while engineers are already fully booked. That might be an early indication of a capacity problem. Seeing it early gives us time to plan before it becomes missed dates or burned-out people. Sometimes it's a customer signal, and those can be much more subtle.
A customer asks the same question for the second or third time. A stakeholder expresses frustration about a timeline. A sponsor who used to attend every call stops showing up. None of those things is necessarily a problem on its own. They probably wouldn't make it into an executive status report either.
But together, they can tell you something important. Finding that signal early can be the difference between having a conversation and managing an escalation.
That's changed how I lead. I don't need to read every set of meeting notes or ask my team to create more reports. I can get the signal without all the noise, step in when I'm needed, and stay out of the way when I'm not.
Why This Matters at the Executive Level
This isn't really about saving a few minutes on email. It's about accountability and awareness.
A lot of execution problems in a growing company don't start with bad decisions. They start with good decisions that aren't followed through, or small problems that don't get enough attention until they become big ones.
Someone says, "I'll get that to you Friday." Two weeks later, nobody remembers where it was said or whether it happened. Or, a customer concern comes up briefly in a project meeting but never makes its way up the organization.
My daily summary helps close both gaps.
I don't have to rely on myself to remember every commitment. I don't have to constantly ask people for status. And when I do follow up, I'm doing it on the right things, at the right time, with the context already in front of me.
It keeps me accountable, too. Seeing the commitments I've made to my own team every morning is a useful reminder that leaders drop balls just like everyone else.
There's another important point here: Cowork works within the information each person has access to. This isn't about giving everyone visibility into the CEO's inbox. It's a personal workflow that can be repeated across a team, with each person tracking their own commitments and responsibilities.
Turning Conversations Into CRM Updates
We've applied the same idea to our sales pipeline. Every CRM has a version of the same problem: the best information about a deal often lives outside the CRM.
It's in an email from the customer. A Teams conversation. A meeting transcript. Someone has to remember to take that information and update the system.
Too often, that doesn't happen. Then leadership is looking at a forecast based on information that's already stale.
We've built a two-step process to address it.
First, Microsoft 365 Copilot reviews the relevant emails, Teams conversations, and meeting transcripts and prepares proposed updates for each opportunity—status, probability, close date, next steps, and the items that need attention first.
Then a person reviews those updates before anything is written back to Dynamics through Copilot for Sales.
That review step is intentional.
The result isn't just less administrative work. It's a pipeline that more closely reflects what customers are actually saying.
Keep a Human in the Loop
None of these workflows should run without oversight.
Copilot is working from the information available to it, and that information isn't perfect. Not every meeting is recorded or transcribed. Important context may never be written down. And something AI identifies as a signal is exactly that—a signal.
It's a reason to ask a question, not a reason to jump to a conclusion.
That's why every workflow I use has a human review point. AI does the gathering, connecting, and surfacing. People provide the judgment.
As these tools move beyond answering questions and begin taking more actions on our behalf, that distinction becomes even more important. Permissions, monitoring, and human oversight can't be something we add later. They have to be part of the workflow from the beginning.
What I've Learned
One of the biggest misconceptions about AI is that its primary value is creating things.
That's not where I've found the most value.
For me, it's tracking commitments. Surfacing early warning signs. Keeping our pipeline current. Connecting information that used to live across separate conversations, meetings, and systems.
As a CEO, I don't have an information problem. I have a signal problem.
The best AI workflows I've built this year don't create more documents for me to read. They give me a clearer view of what was promised, what changed, what's still open, and what needs my attention today.
That's a very different way to think about AI.
If you're a leader trying to figure out where it fits in your organization, don't start by asking what AI can write for you.
Ask what you keep losing track of.
That's probably a much better place to start.
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