- The Midas Report
- Posts
- AI Assistants... Your New Strategic Sidekick
AI Assistants... Your New Strategic Sidekick
3 min read
Midas AI Research
July 09, 2025
The future of productivity is not just about using artificial intelligence tools. It is about building your own assistants. In a recent piece for the Wall Street Journal tech journalist Alexandra Samuel explains that business leaders should move beyond basic tools like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot and begin creating custom AI assistants designed for their specific workflows.
These assistants are tailored systems that can interact with company documents help manage projects and support key decisions. Samuel argues that with minimal effort and a bit of configuration these assistants can dramatically improve how professionals work and think. They reduce friction speed up routine tasks and enable more focused strategic execution.
From Repetition to Insight
Leaders spend surprising time on repetitive work that provides little value. Scheduling formatting file management and searching across systems is necessary but often inefficient. AI assistants can handle much of this work so humans can focus on strategic problem solving and creativity.
Imagine an assistant that generates client reports summarizes documents or answers internal questions based on your own company data. These tools can be trained on real documents and processes giving fast accurate insights. That means smarter decisions supported by context aware information
You Already Have the Tools
No advanced technical background is needed to build a useful assistant. Platforms like ChatGPT and Claude already support memory file uploads and persistent instructions. You can feed in key documents and receive answers based on your own context. For more advanced use cases open source models and retrieval augmented pipelines offer deeper customization.
The important step is to start small. Pick one process where automation can help. It could be writing summaries generating weekly updates or extracting analytics from spreadsheets. Train the assistant on that one task refine its outputs and gradually expand. The better the input the more capable the tool becomes.
A Smarter Partner Not Just a Faster Worker
Samuel highlights that the real value of these assistants goes beyond efficiency. They can identify patterns surface connections and raise better questions. That makes them strategic collaborators not just productivity tools.
When used thoughtfully AI assistants help leaders think more clearly prompt better decisions and allow rapid testing of new ideas. Companies that succeed will be those that treat these tools as active team members rather than add ons.