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A proposal by PLYO Lab

The AI-native
board process

Same trust. Same people. A fraction of the production work.
A proposed operating model for how Operators delivers advisory boards.

Prepared forThe Operators team
ByPLYO Lab
StatusProposal · for discussion
01 · Where the time goes

One board today is roughly 30 manual tasks

Reconstructed from your delivery playbook. Every task is done by hand, in sequence. Each new board adds the same work again, so capacity is capped by hands, and quality depends on who is busy that week.

Phase 1
11 tasks

Setup & info gathering

  • Agreement + invoicing
  • Investment memo, FAQ, value prop, role description
  • Website, LinkedIn, mailing
Phase 2
2 tasks, most hours

Operator scouting

  • Candidate search on LinkedIn
  • Manual outreach process
Phase 3
8 tasks

Selection & formalization

  • Screening & interviews
  • Founder alignment
  • Contracts & rejections
Phase 4
8 tasks

Launch

  • Scheduling & kick-off prep
  • Chair briefing
  • Dashboard & tracking setup

Task counts from the current playbook. Hours per task: to be validated together.

02 · The shift

From documents by hand to one source of truth

The memo, the FAQ, the value proposition, the role description and the LinkedIn post are five renderings of the same facts. Today each is written and updated separately. The proposal: capture the facts once, generate everything from them.

Today · artifact-driven

Every document is hand-made

Each case produces a stack of documents written one by one. When something changes, someone has to remember to chase the other four. Knowledge about the case lives in the documents, and in people's heads.

03 · The proposed workflow

30 tasks become 6 human moments

Humans keep every moment where trust is built. Agents take everything in between.

MOMENT 1Run the intake conversation
MOMENT 2Approve the document pack
MOMENT 3Approve shortlist & outreach
Agents run doc-pack generationpublishingnetwork pre-vetcandidate sourcingscreening & ranking
MOMENT 4Interviews & founder alignment
MOMENT 5Chair briefing call
MOMENT 6Run the kick-off
Agents run correspondence draftscontracts & e-signschedulingdashboard setuprecaps & reporting
Human moment · where the value is
Agent lane · production work
04 · Phase deep-dive · Setup

Eleven tasks, two human moments

Stays human
  • The intake conversation it builds the client relationship; the typing afterwards does not
  • One approval of the full document pack one review covers memo, FAQ, value prop, role description
Agents take over
  • Agreement & invoice triggered on signature
  • Full doc pack generated from the Case Profile
  • Website listing, LinkedIn post & mailing published after approval
Why here

Five documents are five renderings of the same facts. Generating them together removes the inconsistency that comes from updating one and forgetting the rest.

Why the gate

The pack is external-facing, so a human approves once before anything leaves the building. Derivative content (website, post, mailing) is covered by that same approval.

05 · Phase deep-dive · Scouting

The network becomes searchable, not memorable

Agents take over
  • Network pre-vet the moment a case exists, the competency database surfaces matches from the Collective
  • Candidate sourcing scored longlist from public profiles for the competencies the network lacks
  • Outreach drafts personalised per candidate, from the Case Profile
Stays human
  • Approving the shortlist
  • Sending the outreach, under a real name first contact with a senior operator is personal and reputational
Why here

The network is the moat, and today it lives in people's heads. That does not scale, and it walks out the door with people. A competency database makes the strongest asset searchable in seconds, for every case.

Why agents are strong here

Sourcing is high-volume pattern-matching over public data: exactly what people are slow at and agents are fast at. A miss costs nothing: a weak candidate simply never reaches the shortlist.

06 · Phase deep-dive · Selection

Agents read every candidate. People pick them.

Agents take over
  • Screening every applicant read the same way, scored with a written rationale
  • Candidate correspondence & rejections drafted, one-click approve before sending
  • Interview guide generated fresh per case, never stale
  • Contracts assembled from approved templates, e-signature, chased automatically
  • Prep briefs before every call, recaps & CRM updates after
Stays human
  • Interviews
  • Introductions to the founder
  • Founder alignment on the final board
Why here

People skim when there are forty applicants; an agent reads all forty with the same care. Coverage and consistency go up. But the final pick is judgment about people, and that judgment is the product.

Why drafts, not autopilot

Rejections are sensitive and external. A rejection that feels robotic burns a person you may want on the next board. Agents handle the volume; a human owns the tone.

07 · Phase deep-dive · Launch

Coordination disappears. Ceremony stays.

Agents take over
  • Scheduling & participant emails
  • Board dashboard instantiated the moment contracts are signed no longer a setup task
  • Kick-off pack & chair briefing doc synthesised from everything already in the system
  • Recaps & reporting digest after launch founder and operators stay in cadence without anyone writing status emails
Stays human
  • The chair briefing call
  • Running the kick-off
Why here

Launch is split in two: coordination overhead with zero judgment content (scheduling, emails, dashboards) and authority moments (the chair, the kick-off). The first should cost nothing. The second is the board's backbone and stays fully human.

08 · The framework

Automation Triage: how we decide what agents get

A pure ROI score gives wrong answers in a trust business: it would fully automate rejections and outreach, and damage the brand. So two tests come before any scoring.

The Relationship Test

Is a human's presence here part of what the client pays for? If yes, agents prep and follow up, the human performs. No score overrides this.

The Exposure Test

Is the output external-facing and hard to un-send? If yes, agents produce, and a human approves before it leaves the building.

The score, for everything else

priority = hours per case × boards per year × automatability ÷ build effort · filled in with real numbers from a walkthrough of a past case, not estimates.

The build-order rule

Build in the order the data flows, not by score. The Case Profile and the competency database enable nearly everything else, so they come first.

Human-led

Judgment work. Agents absent or ambient notes only.

Assist

Agents prep and recap. The human performs the moment.

Copilot

Agents produce. A human approves in one click.

Autopilot

Agents execute. Humans see a log, not a task.

09 · The agent team

Named agents, each owning one job

Every agent maps to a step in the board pipeline. Highlighted agents are the proposed first wave, closest to the Case Profile.

A · Intake & classification
Operator intake & enrichmentOlivia
Startup intake & routingSara
Investor intake & profilingIvan
Startup assessmentEva
Vertical classifierVera
Venture metrics syncMona
B · Matching & screening
Board matchingBea
Due diligenceDiana
Investor syndicationSydney
C · Delivery documents
Board scoping one-pagerCharlotte
Investment memo & FAQMarcus
D · Comms & relationship
Inbox triage & draftsHannah
Meeting prep & recapLucas
CRM hygieneBella
E · Marketing  /  F · Ops & reporting
Insights & contentBen
NewsletterNora
LinkedIn socialLiam
Nurture sequencesTina
Reporting digestPetra
10 · What this unlocks

Time saved is the smallest of the four wins

Consistency becomes structural

Every case gets the same depth of screening and the same quality of documents, independent of who is busy that week. Quality stops depending on workload.

Institutional memory compounds

Every case enriches the competency database. Board number twenty is cheaper and better-matched than board number one. The manual process learns nothing.

Parallel capacity without headcount

Production no longer scales with hands. Several boards can run at once, and the team's time concentrates on the six moments clients actually pay for.

Hours back, every case

The production work between the human moments largely disappears from the team's calendar. Exact hours: measured together, not asserted.

11 · Roadmap

Build in the order the data flows

01
Case Profile schema & intake capturethe single source of truth everything else reads from
02
Competency database of the Collectivethe network, searchable: pre-vet every new case in seconds
03
Doc-pack generatormemo, FAQ, value prop, role description from one profile, one approval
04
Sourcing & screening agentsscored longlists, consistent screening, drafted correspondence
05
Launch & ops autopilotscheduling, dashboards, recaps, reporting cadence
To validate together · one 30-minute walkthrough of a past case
  • Hours per task today, per phase
  • Boards delivered per year, and the target
  • Where the data lives today (CRM, Notion, mail, heads)
  • What the Collective data currently captures

The method is process-agnostic. The same triage applies to any workflow, not just boards. · PLYO Lab · 2026