Sistava is an AI workforce platform where solo founders hire AI employees to run their business around the clock. Each AI employee has a specific role like sales, marketing, or customer support, with real tool integrations, persistent memory, and the ability to work inside your existing apps like Slack, Gmail, and HubSpot.

What is an AI employee?

An AI employee is an autonomous AI agent with a defined role, persona, skill set, and tool access. Unlike a chatbot that only answers questions, an AI employee takes on recurring work like writing emails, qualifying leads, answering support tickets, and publishing content, and it works on its own around the clock without being prompted each time.

How is Sistava different from project management software?

Sistava is not project management software. You hire AI employees who do the work, not a tool that tracks work done by humans. Your AI employees run sales outreach, write marketing content, answer support tickets, and handle operations on their own, without constant supervision.

How much does Sistava cost?

Sistava has a free plan you can start without a credit card, plus paid plans that scale with how much work you hand to your AI employees. See the pricing page for current plans.

What can AI employees do on Sistava?

Your AI employees take on the recurring work that runs a business: qualifying and reaching out to leads, writing and publishing marketing content, answering support tickets, and handling day to day operations. Each one comes with a role and skill set, so it can start working the day you hire it.

Sistava is built for solo founders and small teams who need to run sales, marketing, support, and operations without hiring a full human team. It gives you the equivalent of a growth team you can hire in minutes.

AI Executive Assistant: A Plain Guide for Operators

Guide — 2026-06-28 — by Mahmoud Zalt

What an AI executive assistant does, in plain language. Email, calendar, meeting prep, and what it replaces, with no jargon and real workflows.

The problem: admin is eating your week

Most managers and operators lose a huge slice of every week to work that does not need their judgment. Sorting email. Booking and moving meetings. Hunting for the right document five minutes before a call. Chasing people for things they said they would do. None of it is strategic. All of it is exhausting, and it crowds out the work only you can do.

The old fix was to hire an assistant. A good one costs $60,000 to $120,000 a year, plus benefits and the time it takes to manage another person. Most teams cannot justify that, so the work simply lands back on you. An AI executive assistant changes the math. It covers about 80% of what a human assistant does, it is available around the clock, and it costs a tiny fraction of a salary.

At a Glance

8-15 hrs: Hours a week most people get back once admin is handled
20 min: Time on email per day instead of two to three hours
$5-10k: Monthly cost of a human executive assistant
${FOUNDER_USD}: Monthly cost of an AI executive assistant ({FOUNDER_NAME} plan)

What it actually does for you

Think of it as a capable assistant who never sleeps and never drops a task. You connect your email and calendar once, tell it your preferences in plain words, and it gets to work. Here is what it takes off your plate every day.

Benefits

Inbox triage

Reads every email, sorts by what needs you today versus later, and drafts replies for the routine ones. You scan a clean queue instead of 200 messages.

Calendar management

Books, moves, and protects your time by your rules. Mornings for focus, buffers between calls, recurring one on ones left alone. You stop playing calendar tetris.

Meeting prep

Thirty minutes before each call you get a one page brief: who is in the room, what it is about, what you discussed last time, and what to say.

Follow up tracking

Pulls action items out of meetings, tracks who owes what, and sends a weekly summary. Nothing slips because nobody wrote it down.

The simplest way to tell an assistant from a chatbot: a chatbot tells you when your next meeting is. An assistant reschedules Thursday, finds a time that works for both sides, and sends the new invite. One answers questions, the other gets things done. An AI executive assistant is firmly in the second camp.

Meeting prep is the part people love most

Most people walk into meetings cold. They burn the first five minutes catching up on context, forget what was agreed last time, and miss the chance to reference something the other person said. It is not a productivity problem so much as a relationship problem, and almost nobody has time to fix it because prep is the first thing that gets cut.

An AI executive assistant fixes it without you lifting a finger. Half an hour before each meeting, a short brief lands in your inbox or chat: the purpose of the call, who is attending with their role and your last interaction, the documents and decisions that matter, a few talking points, and any open items involving the people in the room. You show up prepared, every time, with no extra effort.

One founder put it simply. "I used to wing every meeting and hope I remembered the context. Now I walk in knowing exactly who I am talking to and what we agreed last time. People noticed." That is the whole experience. It feels like having a sharp assistant who did the homework so you did not have to.

What it replaces, and what it does not

Comparison

Dimension	Traditional	With Sista
Monthly cost	$5,000 to $10,000 in salary, plus benefits and management time	${FOUNDER_USD} a month on the {FOUNDER_NAME} plan, 26,000 credits included
Availability	Business hours, with vacation and sick days	Around the clock, no time off, instant response at any hour
Email	Handles roughly 100 to 150 a day before quality slips	No volume limit, consistent sorting and drafting
Meeting prep	Manual research, often skipped when the day is busy	A consistent brief 30 minutes before every meeting
Getting started	Two to six weeks to learn your preferences and tools	About 15 minutes to set up, better every day after
Judgment calls	Reads tone, politics, and sensitive situations well	Follows your rules and escalates anything sensitive to you

Be honest about the limits. An AI executive assistant does digital work: email, calendar, research, writing, and tracking. It does not make phone calls, book physical travel, or handle in person logistics, and it hands anything sensitive back to you rather than guessing. If you already have a human assistant, the two work together. The AI takes the high volume routine, the person keeps the relationship work. That is the 80/20 split, and it is the most common setup for teams that use both.

How to get started in 15 minutes

Hire your assistant (3 minutes) — Sign up on Sistava and create your first AI Employee with an executive assistant role. Give it a name. No technical setup.
Connect email and calendar (3 minutes) — Link Gmail or Outlook with one click. That is what lets your assistant read and manage your inbox and schedule. No keys, no IT ticket.
Tell it your rules (5 minutes) — In plain words: who is always urgent, how you like your calendar, and your tone. These become the instructions it follows.
Add a few writing samples (3 minutes) — Paste a handful of emails you have sent so it learns to sound like you, whether you are writing to a client or your team.
Try one meeting brief (1 minute) — Pick a meeting and ask for a briefing. Tell it what you want more or less of. It adjusts on the spot.

Once it is running, the change is not really about features. It is about what stops happening. The calendar shuffling, the document hunt before a call, the slow reply to someone who actually mattered. All of it quietly goes away, and the time shows up as hours you did not realize you were losing. That is the part people feel in the first two weeks, well before they could name a single feature they used.

FAQ

Do I need any technical skills to set this up?

No. You connect Gmail or Outlook with one click, then tell the assistant your preferences in plain language. There are no keys, no code, and no IT ticket. Most people are fully running in about 15 minutes.

How fast will it learn how I like things done?

Day one is good, day three is noticeably better, and by week two most people say the drafts and briefs feel like their own work. Every time you edit something, it learns. The first week of giving feedback creates the biggest jump.

What if I already have a human assistant?

They work together. The AI handles the high volume routine like email sorting, scheduling, and meeting research. Your human assistant focuses on the relationship sensitive work like personal calls and complex travel. You free up your person to do the judgment work only a person can do.

Can it handle scheduling across time zones?

Yes. It knows your time zone and the time zones of the people you meet, proposes times that work for everyone, accounts for travel days, and avoids scheduling at unreasonable hours. Rescheduling across zones is handled the same way, with no confusion.

Is my email and calendar data safe?

Yes. Everything is encrypted, your data is never used to train models, and it is never shared with anyone else. You can also keep specific senders or threads off limits entirely. Sistava is SOC 2 compliance aligned and not formally certified yet.

What does it cost for a whole team?

Each person gets their own AI Employee. The {FOUNDER_NAME} plan is ${FOUNDER_USD} a month per person. For a group, the {AGENCY_NAME} plan at ${AGENCY_USD} a month covers five people with shared credits. Compare that to tens of thousands a month for five human assistants.

The pitch is not that an AI executive assistant replaces a great human assistant. It is that it gives every operator and manager something they could never afford before: the routine half of an assistant, ready in 15 minutes, for the price of a couple of lunches a month. Hand off the busywork, keep yourself in the loop on anything that matters, and get your week back for the work that actually moves the business.