Guided AI assistant design
Build Your Work AI Assistant
Build an assistant around how you actually work - not a generic job description.
- Audience
- Professionals shaping a bounded personal work assistant
- Outcome
- Evidence, confirmed requirements, and reviewable assistant instructions
Start with your work, not a generic role
A useful personal work AI assistant is grounded in observable work behavior, confirmed future-state preferences, and clearly labeled unresolved decisions. This guided process helps you collect those inputs before writing instructions or granting the assistant any authority.
The assistant supports your work. It does not replace your judgment or act in your name.
A guided three-step process
Keep the outputs from each step. They become the evidence and requirements for the next one, rather than three unrelated prompts.
Understand Your Work
Use approved work content to record recurring questions, information flows, meetings, decisions, commitments, and gaps without designing an assistant yet.
Keep: a fact-based work-pattern evidence report.
Step 2Clarify What You Want
Use the evidence to validate patterns, separate preferences from workarounds, and capture the future behavior that matters.
Keep: a confirmed requirements record.
Step 3Build the Instructions
Convert evidence and confirmed requirements into personal assistant instructions, data needs, action boundaries, and traceability.
Keep: reviewed instructions and unresolved design decisions.
Before you start
- Use only AI tools and connected sources you are authorized to access.
- Remove confidential information or follow your organization’s rules before sharing it with an AI tool.
- Review the final instructions before using them in real work.
- Do not grant an assistant authority to act merely because it can access information.
What this is not
- Not a personality test.
- Not an autonomous agent.
- Not a replacement for professional judgment.
- Not a promise that every workplace tool can be searched or automated.
Use the process responsibly
Some AI tools cannot access your work data, and access to a source does not automatically make information appropriate to disclose. Keep source boundaries, confidentiality, intended audience, uncertainty, and human approval visible in the instructions you create.