How to Turn Hermes Into an AI Chief of Staff

TL;DR

Use Hermes as a chief of staff by giving it persistent knowledge, connecting calendars, email, and call notes, then scheduling proactive briefs and administrative work. The Quicksilver update adds smart approvals, durable background jobs, delivery ledgers, profile routing, and per-task effort, allowing safe tasks to proceed independently while reserving genuinely risky actions for human approval.

Transcript

Hermes is the most powerful agent on the planet and they just dropped quicks which unlocks new capabilities but only if you know how to use them correctly. And in this video I'm going to show you exactly how to turn Hermes agent into your chief of staff that will be way smarter, save you hours of time and even improve any design that you have. So i... Read More

Key Insights

• Hermes can store summarized videos and other useful material in Obsidian memory, creating a knowledge base that remains available for later questions. A suggested workflow asks the agent to extract five crisp bullets from a YouTube URL and save the resulting notes automatically.
• Separate Hermes profiles isolate each user's configuration, skills, memory, session history, and credentials. This makes shared business-assistant scenarios possible while preventing another person's messages from being written into the primary user's vault, although the presenter still recommends keeping a personal Hermes agent private.
• The first step toward administrative automation is asking Hermes to interview the user about daily responsibilities. That conversation helps identify repetitive work, opportunities to save time, and tasks the agent could remove from the user's workload before external services are connected.
• The core three integrations are calendars, email, and call notes. Giving Hermes access to these sources provides enough context to identify upcoming appointments, review unread messages, understand recent conversations, prepare email drafts, and generate a useful daily insight digest each morning.
• Zapier MCP expands the platforms Hermes can access when direct integrations are difficult or unavailable. The presenter highlights community platforms and Microsoft Outlook as examples, while noting that individual permissions can be selected when adding services such as Gmail through an MCP server.
• Grok can search information from X when Hermes uses that model. The demonstrated research prompt requests five recent posts about selected AI topics, ordered by increasing engagement, which gives the agent additional material for idea development and discussion.
• Smart approvals use a second model to examine commands before execution. Harmless actions can proceed without interruption, dangerous actions are blocked, and only genuinely risky requests wake the user, allowing scheduled work to continue without getting stuck on routine permission prompts.
• The Quicksilver update includes smart approvals, durable background jobs, delivery ledgers, profile routing, and per-task effort. Together, these capabilities support independent scheduled work, task tracking, user separation, and adjustable reasoning effort within a more persistent chief-of-staff workflow.
• More videos from this channel:
  • Which AI Repositories Improve Agent Workflows?
  • How to Connect Hermes Agent with NotebookLM
  • How to Run Private AI Models Locally with Ollama
• More from this channel: Jack Roberts

Questions & Answers

Q: How do you turn Hermes into an AI chief of staff?

Start by asking Hermes to interview you about everything you do each day and identify tasks that consume time or create administrative burden. Give it persistent knowledge through saved videos and ideas, then connect your calendar, email, and call notes. Finally, request proactive daily briefs and recurring tasks so Hermes can organize information, prepare drafts, and surface the day's priorities.

Q: How can Hermes create a searchable personal knowledge base?

Send Hermes useful sources such as a YouTube URL and instruct it to study the material, summarize it into five crisp bullets, and save the result to Obsidian memory. The same process can capture educational material, restaurant ideas, business suggestions, or forwarded team input. Once stored, that information becomes available for later questions through the same agent.

Q: What are separate profiles in Hermes used for?

Separate profiles let multiple people communicate with the same Hermes setup without mixing their personal data. Each profile receives its own configuration, skills, memory, session history, and credentials. This can support a business assistant used by several people, or give a family member a distinct space, while the underlying Hermes installation and bot remain shared on the host machine.

Q: Which services should be connected to Hermes first?

The recommended core three are a calendar, email, and call notes. The presenter uses Granola to capture call context and discusses Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, and other platforms accessible through Zapier MCP. Together, these connections allow Hermes to inspect appointments, unread messages, and recent conversations before producing briefs, answering questions, or drafting relevant email responses.

Q: How does Hermes generate a useful daily briefing?

Give Hermes a proactive recurring prompt that tells it to review calendars, emails, calls, and relevant events from the week. It can then deliver a morning breakdown covering scheduled conversations, unread messages, and other actionable context. Because the connected sources are reviewed together, the resulting digest can also include prepared email drafts and specific details related to the day's work.

Q: What are smart approvals in the Quicksilver update?

Smart approvals let a second model review each command before Hermes executes it. The system waves through harmless work, blocks dangerous activity, and requests user attention only when an action is genuinely risky. This prevents a scheduled task, such as checking a calendar and sending a morning summary, from stopping overnight simply because the agent is waiting for routine permission.

Q: What capabilities does the Quicksilver update add to Hermes?

Quicksilver adds smart approvals, durable background jobs, delivery ledgers, profile routing, and per-task effort. Smart approvals reduce unnecessary interruptions, while the other named capabilities provide the foundation for persistent jobs, delivery tracking, distinct user profiles, and task-specific effort. The update is presented as the mechanism that lets Hermes operate more like an independent assistant than a chatbot requiring constant supervision.

Q: How can Hermes help with research, design, and self-improvement?

The demonstrated setup can use Grok to search X for posts about selected topics and arrange results by engagement, helping with research and idea development. According to the description, Kimi K3 can be brought in through OpenRouter for a single turn to produce polished HTML pages and presentations. The bonus workflow uses cron audit history to establish a daily self-improvement loop.

Summary & Key Takeaways

• Hermes can become a persistent knowledge assistant by summarizing YouTube videos, saving useful ideas to Obsidian memory, and answering later questions from that stored material. Information can arrive directly from the user or be forwarded from team members, while separate profiles keep each person's configuration, memory, sessions, and credentials distinct.

• Connecting Hermes to calendars, email, and call notes lets it handle recurring administrative work with broader context. The recommended setup begins with an interview about daily responsibilities, followed by integrations with the core three information sources. Hermes can then produce morning briefs, identify upcoming appointments, summarize unread messages, and prepare draft replies.

• Quicksilver makes scheduled assistance more practical through smart approvals that allow harmless commands to continue while escalating risky actions. The broader workflow also includes durable background jobs, delivery ledgers, profile routing, and per-task effort. The description adds Kimi K3 for HTML and presentations, plus cron audit history for daily self-improvement.