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Every Monday, for years, I began my mornings the same way.
First, I’d scan LinkedIn to see what our competitors had published overnight. Then I’d dig through a stack of emails, flagging anything urgent and hunting for action items buried in long threads. Finally, I’d spend 20 minutes prepping for my first meeting of the week, pulling up old email chains and trying to remember where we’d left off last. From this disorganized morass of information, I’d assemble an overall mental picture of what the day had in store.
These days, I marvel at the amount of time and effort that routine took. Because every single thing I just described is something ChatGPT’s AI agent can now handle. What used to be a manual, multi-hour dissection has been automated into a report that lands in my inbox before I’ve even poured my first coffee.
Agentic AI has been a game-changer for a while now, but it’s also gotten much easier to use. Here are three ways I’m using ChatGPT’s agent mode, and how you should be, too.
Stay On Top Of Industry News
Keeping tabs on industry news is an essential part of every leader’s job. That said, it has a nasty habit of taking more time than it should. Not anymore.
Now, I have an agent to do the skimming for me. I’ve set it up to monitor a set list of sources, including industry publications, competitor blogs and a handful of newsletters. Each morning, it delivers a single briefing organized by topic. Not only that, but it flags anything that mentions my company or competitors by name, highlights emerging trends and notes anything that might warrant a response or a conversation with my team.
The setup is straightforward: give the agent your list of sources and tell it what topics, companies and keywords matter most to your business. The more specific you are upfront, the sharper the output. For my industry, a prompt might look something like this: “Monitor TechCrunch, Product Hunt and the Forrester blog each morning. Flag anything related to form automation, no-code tools or the latest trends in AI-powered workflows. Summarize findings in five bullets or fewer.”
Simplify Meeting Prep
Meetings get a bad rap, and with good reason. According to one study published in Harvard Business Review, CEOs spend as much as 72 percent of their working time in meetings.
Not only do the majority of us have too many of them, but it’s hard to adequately prepare when you’ve got them back to back (to back). I don’t even want to count the number of hours I’ve spent recapping past conversations or waiting while someone hunts for a buried email thread.
Now, I use an agent to make sure I’ve got everything I need, with almost zero effort on my end. First, I give the agent access to my calendar and instruct it to do a search early each morning. For every meeting on the day’s schedule, it pulls related emails by searching for the meeting title, attendee names and any associated company or project names. Then it synthesizes what’s happened so far, surfaces any open questions and drafts a suggested agenda. And voila—a clean briefing is waiting for me by the time I open my eyes.
In order to best prep your inbox for your AI, I recommend keeping your emails organized and meeting titles descriptive. This helps the agent (and you) find the right information fast.
Summarize Emails
If you’re still locked in a Sisyphean battle with your inbox, I have good news: you can release the boulder. AI will not only push it up the hill with ease, but it will keep it there for good.
In addition to automatically filtering your messages, AI can summarize everything you need to know into one tidy write-up. Here’s how it works: Connect the ChatGPT agent to your Gmail and set it to run every morning. Next, prompt it to summarize every email in easy-to-read sentences, and flag emails as urgent if they’re from clients, your leadership team or specifically contain keywords like “urgent” or “important.” You can also ask it to pull out every action item it finds and log it as a task, so nothing gets buried in a thread you meant to revisit.
One practical note: the agent works best when the people emailing you write clear subject lines. You can’t control that completely, but you can set the norm on your own team. A subject line that says “Need decision on Q3 budget by Friday” is something an agent can flag and act on. “Checking in” is not.
You no longer need to be a tech whiz to automate some of your most tedious tasks. Start using these tools now, and free up more time than you ever thought possible.
