Brief
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Using Brief

Skills and example prompts

Brief is available as a web app with embedded AI chat and via chat in WhatsApp. In either chat interface, you can ask questions about your work in natural language or invoke a named skill to run a structured workflow. The examples below show what to ask and what you get back.

What is the difference between a skill and an agent in Brief?

A skill is procedural memory: written instructions that teach Brief how to do a specific type of task. When you ask for one, Brief reads those instructions and follows them, so the same workflow runs the same way every time.

An agent is a question you give Brief once, with a time to answer it: on a schedule, around your meetings, or when a message arrives. It runs while you are not there and reports back. See Agents.

In practice, you ask in chat and Brief applies a skill when you name one. When you find yourself asking the same thing every week, ask Brief to turn it into an agent.

What skills can I ask Brief to run?

You do not have to know what to ask. Brief has a set of named skills you can invoke by name in chat. Ask "what skills do you have access to?" to see the full list at any time.

  • Decision Framing. Frames a tough decision, weighs your criteria, surfaces real options, and recommends a path.
  • Draft in Voice. Drafts a reply or new message in your own voice, grounded in the thread and relationship context.
  • Plan My Week. Reviews your upcoming week and recommends how to shape it around what actually matters.
  • Post-Meeting Follow-up. Extracts notes, decisions, and action items from a past meeting and drafts your follow-up messages.
  • Pre-Mortem. Pressure-tests a plan by assuming it has already failed and identifying what you should fix now.
  • Prep for 1:1. Pulls recent interactions, open commitments, and suggested topics before you meet with someone one-on-one.
  • Prep for Meeting. Prepares you for an upcoming meeting with attendee context, open threads, and relevant commitments.
  • Prioritize. Forces a ranking on competing demands so you can decide what to drop, defer, or delegate.
  • Reflect on Week. Reviews the past week against your commitments and surfaces patterns worth carrying forward.
  • Research Company. Builds a brief on a company by pulling your internal records, network connections, and recent signals.
  • Research Person. Builds a profile of a person to help you understand how they think and how best to engage them.
  • Set Goal. Helps you set, refine, and pressure-test a goal before you commit to it.
  • Status Report. Writes a status report from the real state of your work, for your manager, a peer, yourself or your team, or as a private read on your team's health.
  • Triage Inbox. Reviews your recent unhandled email and sorts it into respond-now, FYI, and delegate.

How do I triage my inbox?

Most inboxes contain a mix of things that need an answer now, things worth knowing, and things that belong to someone else. Reading through all of it to figure out which is which takes time you rarely have.

triage my inbox

Brief reads your recent unhandled email, sorts it into respond-now, FYI, and delegate, and recommends a next action for each item that needs one.

How do I prepare for a 1:1?

Walking into a 1:1 without context on recent interactions and open commitments means starting from scratch every time. Brief does the reconstruction before you walk in.

prep for my 1:1 with [person's name]

Brief pulls recent interactions with that person, surfaces open commitments on both sides, and suggests topics worth raising.

How do I prepare for any meeting?

Meeting briefings run automatically for calendar events. When you want to go deeper on a specific conversation, you can ask on demand.

prep for my meeting with [person's name]

prep for [meeting name]

Brief identifies who is attending, pulls relevant recent threads, and surfaces decisions and commitments that belong in the room.

How do I write a status report?

A status report usually means an hour of reconstructing what happened from email, meetings and memory. Brief already holds that record.

write my status report for my manager: what moved, what's at risk, and what I need from them

Brief writes it from the commitments, decisions and conversations of the past week, in your voice. Ask for a version for a peer, for your team, or for yourself, and say what to emphasize.

How do I check that the work I delegated is getting done?

The version most leaders reach for is team health. It is a private read for you, not a report to anyone.

run a team health status report on my direct reports: what I've handed each of them in the last two weeks, what's done, and what's quietly stalled

Brief goes person by person through what you handed off, what came back done, and what has gone quiet, so you can follow up before a deadline slips rather than after.

How do I reflect on my week?

Most weeks close without a clear read on what moved and what did not. Brief gives you a structured look back.

reflect on my week

Brief reviews what happened against what you planned: what completed, what slipped, and what patterns are worth carrying forward.

How do I ask about my other systems?

When you connect a system such as Excel, SharePoint, Salesforce or Zendesk through Composio, you can ask about it in the same chat, and Brief reads it alongside your email and meetings.

pull the Q4 targets from the Board Pack workbook in OneDrive and tell me where we're behind, and which of my open commitments bear on each gap

See Connecting Brief to other systems with Composio for the setup.

What would someone in my role ask?

Each of these walks through a working week, from the morning brief to the Friday report, with prompts you can run in one click:

How does Brief remember context across conversations?

Each conversation with Brief does not start cold. Brief maintains context at three levels.

Working memory is the current chat history. Semantic memory is the Knowledge Graph built from your connected data, the persistent record of people, projects, decisions, commitments, and goals. Procedural memory is the set of skills Brief knows how to run.

Together, these mean Brief can pick up where you left off, answer questions about your history, and run the right skill for what you need.

Watch it work