I’m really bad at keeping in touch with my professional network. I meet interesting people, have great conversations with them, and then… life happens. It’s hard to remember everything and keep in touch but those types of connections make the world go round.
There is someone I really admire who I met at a conference 4 years ago. He regularly checks in with an interesting article, a piece of news, or a connection that would be interesting for me. Thanks to that, it feels like we have stayed close - and he’s of course - top of mind anytime an opportunity or valuable connection comes to mind.
Very few of us have systems for managing relationships. Most people rely on their brains (imagine that) if you are super organized maybe you have a spreadsheet or a personal CRM but if you don’t have a structure for this yet then this week's tiny AI lab is for you.
This week, we're going to build an AI that helps us stay more connected with our professional network.
Before we start: if you are getting this email forwarded to you and are not yet part of the lab - you can join the tiny AI lab here.
The Challenge:
You're going to build a relationship intelligence agent.
The goal is to help AI identify important people in your life and career, surface relationships that may need attention, and make it easier to stay connected over time.
The prompt to get you started
Drop this into your AI tool of choice:
I want to build a relationship intelligence system. Help me identify the people who are most important in my life and career and create a process for staying connected with them.
First, walk me through how to connect my email and calendar to this tool if that capability exists.
Once connected, analyze my communications and meetings to identify: the people I interact with most frequently, relationships that appear important but have gone dormant, people I may want to reconnect with, and any follow-ups I may have forgotten. Then help me create a simple system for maintaining those relationships over time. Start by asking me any questions you need before making recommendations.
Not comfortable connecting your email and calendar?
This week I switched up the "too easy" section since I've gotten some feedback from people that they don't feel comfortable giving the tools access yet. Totally fair.
If this is your situation, you can try to build the same thing manually and use the tool to help you design a system instead of an agent.
Then drop this prompt into your AI tool of choice:
I want to build a relationship management system for professional connections. I need your help designing a system for maintaining and strengthening these relationships over time.
How should I organize and categorize these people? What information should I track? What outreach frequency makes sense for different types of relationships? What reminders, routines, or workflows would help me stay in touch consistently?
Design a simple system that I could realistically maintain in less than 30 minutes per week. Finally, tell me what information I should start collecting so this system becomes more useful over time.
Why this matters?
The purpose of AI is still being shaped. The technology is moving quickly, but we're still very early in figuring out what role we want it to play in our lives. Every week people are discovering new use cases, building new workflows, and deciding what tasks they want to hand off and which ones they want to keep for themselves.
A lot of the examples we see focus on efficiency. How do I write faster? Research faster? Build faster? Those are useful applications and I use AI for those things all the time.
But I'm also interested in use cases that expand human capacity rather than simply replacing human effort. Maintaining relationships feels like a good example of a way in which we can leverage AI to ease the mental load and expand our capacity for connection. Most of us don't lose touch with people because we don't care about them. We lose touch because life gets busy and our attention gets pulled to something else.
If we're all helping shape how this technology gets used, I'd like some of those experiments to focus on strengthening the things that make us human rather than replacing them.
That’s it for this week.
Hit reply and tell me what you thought of the challenge this week.
I read every response, and your experience helps me shape these challenges. If you get stuck or have questions, reach me at [email protected]