Role
Hire an AI project coordinator
The unglamorous half of running projects, done every week without anyone having to be the person who nags.
What this worker is
An AI project coordinator in Polaris is a worker you hire to keep a board truthful. It finds tasks with no owner or no date, drafts the sprint plan from the backlog, writes the weekly status roll-up, and maps dependencies between workstreams. It proposes; the people who own the work confirm priorities, dates and scope.
- Typical output
- Status roll-up plus a list of gaps
- Core connections
- Linear, Slack, Notion
- Illustrative task
- 2.1 human-hours, $4.20
What this worker is great at
Noticing what everyone else has stopped seeing. A board that has been running for three months contains work with no owner, dates that passed in April and two lanes that are quietly the same project. The coordinator lists all of it in one document, ordered by the damage it will do, and turns each item into a task pointed at a named person.
It writes the status roll-up nobody wants to write on a Thursday afternoon: what shipped, what slipped, what is blocked and who is blocking it. Because it works from the board rather than from what people say in the meeting, the version it produces is the one that includes the awkward line.
Sprint preparation is the third piece. Backlog in, a proposed sprint out, with each item carrying acceptance criteria as a checklist so the definition of done is written before the work starts rather than argued about at the end.
What to connect it to
Linear
When engineering work lives there and the coordination has to reconcile two boards rather than pretend one exists.
Slack
Decisions get made in channels and never reach the board. The Inbox turns those messages into prefilled task suggestions you approve.
Notion
For the project documentation the roll-up has to link back to.
GitHub
Useful when what shipped is best answered by what merged.
Where the human stays in charge
The coordinator prepares
- A list of unowned, undated and stale work
- A proposed sprint with acceptance criteria
- The weekly status roll-up
- A dependency map across workstreams
Owners decide
- What the priority actually is
- Who takes each piece of work
- Whether a date can be committed to
- What gets cut when the sprint is too full
What a weekly pass costs
Illustrative example computed from the published human-hours formula: one board audit and roll-up in a single session.
2.1
Human-equivalent hours
4,500 characters, 5 criteria ticked, 1 doc
$4.20
Weekly cost
At $2 per human-hour delivered
$0
Software cost
Unlimited humans, tasks and workstreams
What an AI project coordinator is not good at
It cannot set priority. It can show that two lanes both claim to be the most important thing this quarter, and that is where its authority ends. Priority is a judgement about the business, and delegating it to a worker produces a plan nobody follows.
It also has no read on morale. A person who is quietly stuck looks identical to a person who is quietly fine on a board, and the coordinator will report the task as in progress in both cases. That gap is what a standup is for.
And its estimates are inherited, not earned. It has never built your product, so a date it proposes is a restatement of what somebody already said rather than an independent judgement of how long the work takes.
Work this role picks up
Dependencies as dated items, not as things people said in a meeting
Two teams agree something in a call. Neither writes it down. Three weeks later each is waiting for the other. A worker makes the promise a tracked item.
The two hours before planning that nobody schedules
Carry-over, gaps and blockers assembled the day before, so the meeting is about commitment.
Your roadmap document and your tracker disagree
A weekly diff between what the roadmap claims and what the tracker actually says.
Questions people ask
+How is an AI project coordinator different from an automation rule?
A rule fires on a trigger and does one thing. This worker reads the whole board, writes a judgement about what is wrong with it, and delivers that as a document with tasks attached. It also explains why each item is on the list, which a rule cannot do.
+Can it assign work to people?
It proposes owners and dates and creates the tasks, and the people involved confirm. Assignment behaves the same for humans and AI workers in Polaris because both are rows in the same members table.
+Does it replace a project manager?
No. It removes the administrative half of the role, which is chasing, tidying and reporting. Prioritisation, negotiation and knowing when a team is struggling stay with a person.
+How often should it run?
Weekly is the natural cadence, assigned as a recurring task you create. A worker runs when work is assigned to it, so the rhythm comes from the board rather than from a schedule inside the worker.
Related
Hire an AI ops coordinator
It writes down how your company does things, so the answer stops living in whichever colleague happens to be on holiday.
Hire an AI executive assistant
Every commitment made in a meeting becomes a task with a name and a date on it before the next meeting starts.
Dependencies as dated items, not as things people said in a meeting
Two teams agree something in a call. Neither writes it down. Three weeks later each is waiting for the other. A worker makes the promise a tracked item.
The two hours before planning that nobody schedules
Carry-over, gaps and blockers assembled the day before, so the meeting is about commitment.
Your roadmap document and your tracker disagree
A weekly diff between what the roadmap claims and what the tracker actually says.
Connect Linear to Polaris
A Linear API key carries one person's visibility, so the account you make it on decides what every worker can see.
Workstream
A strand of work that keeps going, rather than a project that ends.
Focus lane
A commitment for a horizon, not a filter over everything you have.