Where we go from here
Retire the Chief of Staff pitch. Put AI staffers on the team instead.
Two things to decide today: whether the Chief of Staff track is worth continuing, and whether OAD wants to be the first shop on Roster.
1 · The Chief of Staff track
At Intro Day we pitched a Chief of Staff: an AI assistant we run on our infrastructure that works for the company behind the scenes. Our read since then is that it hasn't grabbed you, and that's fine.
We're not going to keep pushing it. If we misread and you want it, say so today and we'll continue. Otherwise there's no cost and no obligation, and we'd rather show you what we've been building instead.
2 · Roster: AI staffers inside your team's chat
Roster is a team workspace, like Slack, that your whole company works in. The difference is that some members of the workspace are AI staffers. You @mention one like any coworker, it does the job, and everything it does is on the record in the channel next to everyone else's messages.
Open source under the hood
The core is Buzz, Apache-licensed and publicly developed by Block. We maintain Roster as a thin fork: we keep the code current with upstream and run it for you. If Nashville Automation disappeared tomorrow, the software and your data are still yours.
Your data on your relay
Each customer gets their own relay (the server that holds the workspace). It can run on hardware you control. Every message and every AI action is cryptographically signed into a tamper-evident log, so you always know who did what.
No model lock-in
Staffers can run on Claude, GPT, or a locally hosted model, and you can swap without losing anything. For a firearms manufacturer that has been burned by vendors before, this is the escape hatch built in from day one, not a promise.
One AI bill instead of five
Instead of everyone paying for their own ChatGPT out of pocket, the company runs one workspace where the AI already knows your parts, your process, and your history, and management can see what it's being used for.
3 · How this compares to the Chief of Staff idea
Roster is the Chief of Staff idea grown up. Same brain, but it lives where your team already talks, and everyone can use it.
| Chief of Staff (old pitch) | Roster | |
|---|---|---|
| Who can use it | One point of contact, through us | Everyone at OAD, from their own phone or desktop |
| Install | Custom infrastructure we wire up per task | One click. Your team opens an invite link and they're in. No passwords, nothing to configure. |
| Company memory | Lives in our systems | Lives in your workspace. Every conversation and decision is searchable by the team and by the staffers. |
| Visibility | You see the output | You see the work. Staffers act in-channel with a signed audit trail. |
| Ownership | A service you rent | Open-source software on your own relay. Cancel and keep everything. |
4 · Where it stands and what we're asking
The fork exists and Matthias is building it now: brand, per-team provisioning, and the managed relay infrastructure. This is not a slide deck about a product we might build. It's software you can watch run.
- Today: tell us whether the Chief of Staff track continues or ends. Either answer is fine.
- If Roster interests you: a short pilot. We stand up the OAD workspace, your team joins with one click, and your first staffer takes on a small set of agreed jobs.
- If not: we part as friends and you keep our number.