CFTE AI Chief of Staff Programme

Course Description & Learning Outcomes

The AI Chief of Staff is not a role or a title. It is a way of operating, and it sits at the intersection of two different performance problems: can a professional use AI to become dramatically more capable, and can that professional turn personal leverage into new systems of work, safer decisions and faster execution across the organisation.

CFTE's working model is deliberately multiplicative. An AI Chief of Staff combines the capability of a Supercharged Professional, which is domain experience, AI skills and durable human capability, with AI Transformation Capability, which is the ability to analyse where AI creates value, design the system, act to make it real, protect it responsibly and transform how the organisation works. Strength on one side alone is not enough. A highly capable AI user who cannot change the organisation stays an exceptional individual contributor. A transformation leader without AI depth cannot lead the redesign credibly or hands-on.

The programme develops both sides at once, using a real organisational challenge as the vehicle.

Weekend 1, 5 and 6 September: The Exponential AI Era and Personal Tool Mastery. The Third Wave of AI and what it changes about professional performance, the AI-fication of jobs and talents, the AI stack beneath the interface, model choice, prompting and context engineering, configuring a personal AI environment, AI-native knowledge and data work. Output: Personal AI Operating System.

Weekend 2, 12 and 13 September: High-Performance Work, Systems Thinking and AI-Assisted Building. Translating complex work into objectives, actors, inputs, decisions and dependencies, mapping activities end to end, deciding what people should do and what AI should do, designing human review and escalation, turning effective AI interactions into repeatable workflows, AI-assisted development and rapid prototyping.

Output: High-Performance AI Workflow.

Weekend 3, 19 and 20 September: Agentic AI and Autonomous Execution. Prompts, workflows and agents and when each is appropriate, planning and task decomposition, memory and context, connecting AI to data, systems and tools through APIs and MCP, agent builders and orchestration platforms, testing against realistic scenarios and edge cases, guardrails, permissions, monitoring and fallback design. Output: AI System Prototype.

Weekend 4, 26 and 27 September: The AI Chief of Staff in Action. Selecting the right opportunities, augmentation versus automation versus transformation, the people system and the organisation system, avoiding shadow AI and the team-of-freelancers problem, stakeholder and dependency mapping, pilot scope and sequencing, communicating opportunity without hype, and an executive simulation in which participants present a recommended initiative and respond to challenge. Output: AI Chief of Staff Impact Blueprint.

Participants will be able to:

• Understand how exponential AI progress differs from linear change, and what it does to professional work and organisational execution

• Build a Personal AI Operating System of tools, prompts, instructions, knowledge assets and working practices for performing at a higher level

• Redesign tasks and processes as structured, repeatable human-AI workflows

• Apply systems thinking to decompose complex work into objectives, dependencies, decisions and controls

• Build and orchestrate AI agents and autonomous systems that carry out meaningful multi-step work

• Test AI systems for reliability, control and practical usability, and design human oversight, escalation and fallback

• Identify high-value opportunities for responsible AI adoption and judge impact against feasibility

• Support leadership decisions with evidence and judgement, and influence implementation across functions without formal authority

Four applied outputs: Personal AI Operating System, High-Performance AI Workflow, AI System Prototype, AI Chief of Staff Impact Blueprint.

After the programme: participants join the Founding Cohort network, retain access to shared prompts, workflows and cohort resources, and reconvene for a 90-day implementation clinic led by Huy.