A Chinese AI product manager shared her experience of creating six AI employees to significantly boost her #productivity. Vivi Mengjie Xiao reported that while her output soared, so did her exhaustion. The content creator also suggested that the #future of work might increasingly resemble 'one-person companies.'
This 'as-told-to' essay is based on a conversation with Vivi Mengjie Xiao, who works as an AI product manager and is also a prominent content creator on RedNote, China's social media platform. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
As an AI product manager in China, I was tasked by my CEO earlier this year to explore how AI could drive innovation beyond mere cost-cutting. Outside of my corporate role, I am a content creator on RedNote, where I share AI tools, workflows, and insights with over 45,000 followers. I used to spend approximately four hours daily gathering AI industry news, which involved reading posts on X (formerly Twitter), newsletters, blog posts, and translating English sources into Chinese. This led me to question: 'Can I automate this?' If AI can handle information gathering, what other tasks can it perform? My principle became: if a task is repetitive, it should be automated. Consequently, I developed six AI employees, each designed to address a specific problem I encountered, splitting their duties between my professional and personal life.
My initial venture into #OpenClaw began by setting up just one 'lobster'—a popular nickname among Chinese netizens for deploying an OpenClaw agent—and attempting to have it manage everything. I intended for it to oversee my calendar, schedule, to-do list, and monitor my work. Prone to distractions, I sought its assistance in maintaining focus.
