You can't call yourself an AI-native leader if you haven't built a second brain, for yourself first and then for your team.
Don't know what that is? You're not behind. It's a new skill, a human one, and most of what's written about it is noise.
I share here what I learn from other execs: what they built, how they use it every day, and what I'm building myself.
Have a second brain? Let's talk.
New to second brains?
A second brain is everything your AI needs to know about how you and your company work: the decisions, the processes and best practices, the brand, the meetings and emails behind them. You have probably built some part of it yourself already.
Why do leaders build one?
They want to:
- reduce cognitive and information overload
- make better decisions, faster
- automate their workflows to give them and their team more leverage
- improve their game every week by accelerating their learnings
- and... find more time for being human
Common uses for a second brain
Building a second brain is fun(?). But what for? Let's hear it.
One thing that almost everyone has built (often partially): a chief of staff
Here are the common jobs and responsibilities of an AI chief of staff.
Stay on top of your day
- The morning brief
- Inbox triaged, replies in your voice
- Plan my day, focus time protected
- Evening review, tomorrow confirmed
Never drop a ball
- The one-pager before each call
- Recap and follow-up after
- Promises captured and chased
- Decisions logged, never relitigated
Keep people close
- Who matters and how to talk to them
- People file from transcripts
- Who went quiet
- What customers said this week
- Catch customer problems early
- Plan customer visits that count
Get better every week
- The top three, planned against the quarter
- Committed vs happened
- Does your calendar match your goals?
- Call coaching, the pre-mortem
- On-brand, fact-checked decks
See the setup of other AI‑native leaders
I ask every guest to open theirs: the machines, the files, the process.
Adir Ben-YehudaCEO, Autonomy AI
- Adir 2: a private GitHub folder of plain text files holding the goals, the decisions, the fundraising and the team
- Claude Code as the front door, connected to Gmail, Drive, Slack, Linear, HubSpot and the company's code
- A daily routine rewrites the files from four places, so the brain does not go stale
- All 18 employees have their own; the CTO builds them, and playbooks pass from one to the next as plain files
François LopitauxSVP of Product Management, ThoughtSpot
- Personal memory and shared company facts
- Calendar, Salesforce, Slack, Gong, product usage, and customer stories connected
- Workflows built in chat, refined, and scheduled
- Calendar briefings, customer alerts, and visit plans
MadMaxCTO, Gladia
- A Mac mini at home, unreachable from outside the house
- Gitea: a small Git service he runs himself, a local GitHub, where every email, Slack, WhatsApp and meeting lives
- Paper Trail: an app on top that indexes a pile of scanned paper and searches it, no folders
- Cursor as the front door, OpenCode + OpenRouter to switch models
Guy YalifChief Evangelist, Webflow
- The second brain lives in Notion; calls are recorded there
- Claude reads Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar and Slack directly; a Custom GPT on the side
- BossGPT: how to communicate with one coworker, learned from your DMs and emails with her
- A Chief of Staff with three jobs: plan my week, the goal of the day, meeting prep