We have all been there. We've all been chasing the AI agent hype, creating every single agent, downloading every single skill, and hoping that our systems and processes will get better.
But what nobody is telling you is that that is the worst way to actually implement AI employees into your business and into your life.
When I started playing with AI employees, I just started willy-nilly building them, creating skills, creating routines, and it got messy very quickly because I didn't really remember what I had. Half of them I didn't even need or use, because they were tweaked and targeted to someone else's business. I could easily have run off down a rabbit hole and created 197 agents when I'm only ever going to use about 10 of them.
So the first thing you actually need to do is stop downloading every single skill and trying to create all these different agents to do all these different things, and start with the boring stuff. The boring stuff is mapping your AI org chart.
How I actually work: one COO and a bank of skills
I basically only ever communicate with one AI employee, my COO. It runs on Opus, and it leverages everything underneath it to get all the shit done.
Everything underneath my COO is a skill. Skills are literally just job descriptions. A skill is a file that teaches the AI to do something in a particular way that suits you and your business. It can be a single process, or a group of processes like a review checkpoint. It can be a certain SOP. It can be specific to one area of your business or to many. Each skill file can also say which Claude model it runs on, so you don't need to sort anything into levels.
If you want to call your skills AI employees, you can. I do it that way because it's fun. My Scriptwriter is a skill, and when I give it an Instagram task it reads the post type and pulls the scripting skill that fits, whether that's a talking head or a B-roll caption. My Blog Manager is a skill that writes my blog posts from my briefs. My ManyChat Manager is a skill that sets up the keyword flows that send people my posts. At the foundation of it all, they're just skill files.
Where people get confused is that a skill is essentially an employee, but it's an employee that doesn't have the ability to do anything on its own. That's why we set up a workflow, and that comes later in the sequence.
When I'm delegating to AI, through my workflow manager or in the chat, I'm talking directly to my COO. I don't have a different chat for every single skill. The COO picks the correct skill based on what the task is, and it has an index of every skill so it does that correctly each time.
The reason we do it this way is so that the repetitive processes and flows in our business get done on repeat. When you think about it, that's how employees actually work. You teach an employee a job and they do that job on repeat, and that's all a skill is. You don't need multiple touch points. You can have one, a COO, that picks the right skill for you.
Anthropic's own engineers make the same case in their talk Don't Build Agents, Build Skills Instead, and I've written up why I stopped building agents in Stop building AI agents: build one AI COO and a bank of skills instead.
The order you build it in
- Map your org chart with the AI Org Mapper. That's this post.
- Build your COO, and hand it your org chart.
- Your COO builds the skills on your org chart, starting with your top five.
- From then on, you delegate everything to your COO, and it picks the right skill for each task.
The AI Org Mapper only maps your org chart. It doesn't build anything. It tells you what to build and in what order, and your COO builds it.
What you'll have at the end
You install one skill, the AI Org Mapper, and it takes you through a brain dump session about how you run your business. When you map out your organisation, you're mapping out all of the different processes and things you do in your business, and those become your skills. At the end it gives you this.
MY AI ORG CHART
Guardrail: nothing goes live without my approval.
Me
└── COO - the one I talk to; picks the right skill for each task
├── CONTENT
│ ├── [Skill] - [the job it does]
│ └── [Skill] - [the job it does]
│ sub-skills underneath where a job needs them
├── CLIENTS
│ └── [Skill] - [the job it does]
└── ADMIN
└── [Skill] - [the job it does]
BUILD THIS WEEKEND - the top five
1. COO
2. ...
3. ...
4. ...
5. ...
STAYS WITH ME (or a human)
- ...
Download the AI Org Mapper skill →
The areas on yours will be your own. Everyone's org chart is going to be different because everyone works differently. Some people are freelancers. Some people already have a team. The AI Org Mapper builds yours around how you actually run your business, not around mine.
Why the permissions matter
When we're thinking about how we structure the org chart, we need to think about permissions and guardrails.
In my setup, no AI employee publishes or changes anything live on its own, and that includes my COO. The guardrail is my approval. Nothing goes live until I approve it by setting a status on the task.
My Blog Manager is a good example. It writes the post and sends it back to me for review. It only publishes once I've set the task to "w/ agent to publish". Until I do that, it can't.
Where I'm heading next is proper permission levels, where my COO can act on the bigger things once I've approved them. That's why the AI Org Mapper asks you what has to stay with you or a human, so it's written on your org chart before you build anything.
What you need before you start
- The Claude desktop app on a paid plan, with the Claude Code tab.
- Your AI brain set up. The AI Org Mapper reads what's already written about your business so it doesn't ask you things it already knows. If you haven't set it up, do that first: How to set up your AI brain in Obsidian.
- The AI Org Mapper skill: Download the AI Org Mapper skill →
You don't need to connect any tools, and you don't build any skills in this session.
Step 1 - Install the AI Org Mapper
Unzip the download. Inside you'll find a folder called org-mapper with a file called SKILL.md in it.
- Open the Claude desktop app.
- Go to Customise.
- Then Skills.
- Then Add Skill.
- Upload the SKILL.md file from the org-mapper folder.
It's now available in every chat. If you want to know more about how skills work, it's in How to Build a Claude Skill.
What you'll see: AI Org Mapper in your list of skills.
Step 2 - Start the session
Click the Claude Code tab and start a new chat. Click the + at the bottom of the chat and choose your AI brain folder, so the AI Org Mapper can read your business and save your org chart into it.
Then type this.
Hey Claude, I want to use /org-mapper to map out my AI org chart.
It starts by telling you what it's already read in your AI brain, so you know what it knows.
Step 3 - Answer the questions
The AI Org Mapper takes you through a process of understanding what you do in your business, how you run it, and all of the different things you need. It asks one question at a time, and it's looking for the gaps in your business. These are the questions it asks.
Give me a brain dump of what you do Monday to Friday - what a typical
day looks like for you.
Give me a brain dump on what you currently outsource to humans.
Give me a brain dump on the things you absolutely hate doing in your
business.
Give me a brain dump on the things you find easy & the things you find
challenging.
Is there anything that has to stay with you, or with a human, no matter
what?
Answer the way you'd talk to a friend. Voice notes are perfect for this. Have your calendar and your task list open while you do it, because the small jobs are the ones you'll forget.
Step 4 - Read your org chart and your top five
When you've answered everything, the AI Org Mapper shows you the different areas of your business and the skills each one needs, with your COO at the top. There are no more than fifteen skills on it for now, and some of them will have sub-skills underneath. We don't want it to be overwhelming, but we do want it to show you what's going to work for your business in the long run, and where there's potential for skills you can build later.
It also tells you which jobs aren't worth a skill, because sometimes it's not worth it, and other times it is.
Then it gives you the top five that will make the biggest difference in your business, the ones to build this weekend. The first one is always a COO, or a variation like a chief of staff.
Read it through and tell it if anything's in the wrong place. When you're happy, it saves the org chart in your AI brain as AI ORG CHART.md. That's your index, and it's the thing I didn't have when I started.
The catch, and the fix
The org chart is only as good as the brain dump. If you rush the questions, you'll map the jobs you think about and miss the ones that take your time without you noticing, and your COO will build the wrong skills first.
The fix is to keep adding to it. Every time you catch yourself doing something that isn't on the chart, open a chat, run /org-mapper again and tell it what you found. It reads the org chart it already saved and updates it. Do the same whenever your business changes, like a new offer or a new type of client, and before you build anything new.
What this looks like as a business
Every business owner you support is looking at the same lists of agents online and wondering which ones to build. Sitting down with them to map their AI org chart, with the areas of their business, the skills each one needs and the guardrails, is the part they can't do for themselves. You're paid for knowing what to build and in what order.
Start with one
Your org chart tells you what to build, and your COO builds it. Now that you know what you need to make, make your first employee, and it's more than likely going to be a COO. Its primary job is to be your right hand and leverage the skills on your org chart. Go to The First AI Employee I'd Build as a Non-Techie Founder: An AI COO, build that one, and hand it your AI ORG CHART.md.
If you haven't got your AI brain set up, that's the foundation for all of this: start here.
this is the free stuff — imagine what we'd build together
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