AI Automation: Agents, Culture Quizzes, and 10x-ing Output with Amelie Missig
Episode Summary:
When Eight Sleep's CEO challenged the company to 10x their output with AI, Amelie Missig went all-in. She shares about how she built an agent, designed an AI culture-fit quiz, and got agents working in parallel across Claude Cowork and Slack. This is a practical look at what AI automation really looks like inside a fast-growing startup. Enjoy!
You can connect with Amelie on LinkedIn here!
FULL VIDEO
You can watch the full video of this A Chief of Staff podcast episode here!
Episode highlights:
00:00: How David learned about Amelie’s AI work through prior A Chief of Staff podcast episode with Jordan DeTar
02:45: How Amelie built an AI-focused onboarding ecosystem
06:30: How Amelie continued to improve her AI workflows and how Eight Sleep wanted 10x performance via AI
08:45: How Amelie designed an internal AI Culture Quiz
12:45: How the AI Culture Quiz could help better understand if someone was a culture fit before they joined the company
15:30: A breakdown on Agents, Slack Bots & Agentic Workflows
19:30: How Amelie became “The AI Person” internally
24:00: How Amelie thought about AI rollout, adoption & change management
29:00: Measuring AI ROI & the “Second‑Order Effects” View
30:30: Amelie’s Background: the book she wrote called My Journey Back To Love, entrepreneurship , and internships
33:48: Why AI & how to get started
Episode overview
In this episode, David Nebinski interviews Amelie Missig, a recent grad and BizOps generalist at Eight Sleep, about how she rapidly became the company’s “AI person” and built a practical ecosystem of automations and agents.
Amelie traces her long-standing interest in business and entrepreneurship, which began with childhood ventures and a book she published at age nine. That bias toward shipping things met a catalytic moment when Eight Sleep’s CEO gave an all-hands directive: everyone should 10x their output with AI, not to replace jobs but to amplify people’s value.
Starting from a messy, fragmented onboarding/offboarding process with no dedicated HR team, Amelie and Jordan mapped roughly 30 steps end-to-end. Rather than automating a single piece and creating handoff friction, they decided to automate the entire chain. Using Claude Cowork, Amelie built an agent named Kaya that now completes onboarding and offboarding in about 10 minutes in the background. She describes the painful but rewarding early phase of nonstop debugging and then the subsequent optimization passes that halved run times through small design tweaks, like passing spreadsheet row numbers instead of asking the agent to search.
Amelie then shares her second major project, an AI-powered culture quiz. Trained on internal meeting transcripts, operating principles, and the CEO’s reading list, the 20-question quiz clusters employees into archetypes such as Operator, Architect, or Scientist. It’s designed to be descriptive, not judgmental, and will supplement culture interviews by giving hiring managers archetype-aware probing questions and better coaching insights for existing team members. Building it forced her to learn GitHub, Vercel, databases, and permissions.
She closes by encouraging Chiefs of Staff and operators to start with a real, annoying recurring problem, ask AI what’s realistically automatable, and accept that the first build will be the hardest, but also the unlock.
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Connect with Amelie
You can connect with Amelie on LinkedIn