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Using Tavus to your unfair advantage: AI workplace consultant
Written by
Jack Virag
I shouldn’t be telling you any of this.
This is a guide written by me, not Tavus. It’s somewhat unethical and extremely effective. Since companies are using AI for all sorts of stuff, ethical and otherwise, I wanted to write this guide to democratize AI-powered career navigation.
We’re talking about using highly-personalized AIs and lots of context to help you make better decisions in the workplace.
If done correctly, your Tavus custom persona will be able to advise you—using real information, not just hypotheticals–about:
- How to generate impact
- Which people to work with
- How to organize projects
- How to communicate better
- How to set yourself up for promotions
- And everything else
If you pull it off, you’ll have an always-on AI buddy that has virtually unlimited memory and context to help you make the best decisions.
Here’s how:
Step 1: Assembling knowledge bases
Tavus Knowledge Bases allow you to give your personal AI counterpart permanent context that it can call upon at any time using RAG.
In order to be an effective workplace consultant, it needs context. As much as possible.
💭Note: Tavus doesn’t read your Knowledge Base documents or do anything with them except in a troubleshooting/support context.
I’d recommend the following:
Context about your immediate teammates
You’ll need to identify who you work with regularly and create bios for them that your workplace consultant can reference. You don’t need tons of personal information, just whatever’s relevant in the workplace.
I’d recommend starting with:
- What their title is
- Org chart context
- What their day-to-day is like
- How they prefer to work
- How they prefer to communicate
- What motivates them
- What demotivates them
LinkedIn scrape
If you feel like going the extra 0.62 miles, you can just copy and paste their LinkedIn page into a text file too. This will help your workplace consultant understand even more clearly who your coworkers are.
If it sees that one of your coworkers is an ex Bain consultant, it’ll know that they probably communicate differently than an ex car salesperson. Maybe more of a focus on strategic outlining and less on big splashy moments.
Because of the way RAG and LLMs work together, you won’t need to format this document too much. Just keep it as a text file.
Company info
Nothing crazy here, and not super necessary if your company already has a really accessible mission, web presence, etc.
The reason behind this information is that your AI workplace consultant will reference it against whatever projects and initiatives you’re planning. If your company mission clearly states that it targets consumers, and you’re pitching a big enterprise play, it’ll be able to take that mismatch of alignment into account when giving you advice.
Your goals
Most companies and teams set annual targets and quarterly goals. It’s good for your AI workplace consultant to know these, for a couple of reasons:
- It can help you make sure you’re not getting distracted with side projects
- It can help you reframe or adjust your ideas so that they map to the org and company goals
- It can help you describe your impact in a way that aligns with the company
In addition to company and team goals, you should also tell it your personal goals. Some examples might be:
- I want to pivot into management
- I really enjoy mentoring people; that brings me more happiness than anything else
- I want to set and hit aggressive goals for the next year
- I’d like more time away from work so I can focus on my hobbies
- I want to be involved in projects that teach me more about graphic design and animation
With these in mind, your AI buddy can truly help you advocate for yourself.
Step 2: Putting the knowledge bases into Tavus
Once you’ve got all your documents—team info, company info, goals, etc.—ready and saved to your drive, it’s time to make them a part of your personal AI workplace consultant’s context and memory.
First, you’ll need to go to your Tavus dashboard. You’ll need an account for this; even a free one will suffice.
Once you’re in there, go to the Knowledge Base tab in the side panel. It will take you to a screen that allows you to upload, delete, and manage your existing knowledge bases—if you have any already.
💭 Note: Knowledge bases can be many different file types including images, PDFs, JSON, markdown, flat files, and text files. For this, I’d recommend just using TXT or PDF.
Give your files names that you’ll remember, because you’ll need to reference them later.
Once you’re done, hit Save. Congrats, your context is now in the platform. The next step is to reference it properly.
Step 3: Creating a workplace consultant persona
This step is fun: You get to make your own persona. This is your buddy, your ride-or-die, so be sure to personalize it. Choose a Replica that you vibe with. Give it a cool name. If all goes well, this will be your lifelong friend and advisor.
After choosing and naming a Replica, you’ll need to give it both a system prompt and persona context. We’ll use the system prompt to lay down a foundational instruction layer, and the persona context to describe the character, expertise, and conversational context.
Example System Prompt:
You are a private workplace consultant built using Tavus, designed to help your user make better decisions at work.
You do not guess — you reason. When you don’t know something, you say so.
You use uploaded Knowledge Bases to ground every answer in the user’s real context — their team, company, goals, and communication styles.
Your role is not to flatter or speculate; it’s to advise. That means:
You tell the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable.
You provide actionable guidance, not vague affirmations.
You balance empathy with precision — think strategist first, therapist second.
Your north star is impact: helping the user achieve visible, career-advancing outcomes through better decision-making, prioritization, and interpersonal alignment.
Always reason step-by-step internally, but speak in plain, human terms — short sentences, low ego, conversational tone.
You are the user’s mirror with memory — a thinking partner who understands their world and helps them act within it effectively.Example Persona Context:
Name: The Workplace Consultant
Tone: Calm, pragmatic, quietly confident. Speaks like a trusted advisor, not a motivational coach.
Core Traits: Analytical, emotionally intelligent, observant, nonjudgmental, efficient.
Expertise:
Organizational dynamics and communication styles
Decision-making frameworks and prioritization
Team alignment, influence, and stakeholder management
Performance framing and self-advocacy within corporate systems
Purpose:
To serve as a user’s personal workplace strategist — someone who understands their coworkers, their company’s incentives, and their personal ambitions, and helps them navigate all three with precision.
Guiding Principles:
Every recommendation must be context-aware (grounded in uploaded Knowledge Bases).
Focus on clarity over complexity: simple frameworks, clear rationale, concrete next steps.
Highlight second-order effects: how a choice today impacts trust, perception, and future leverage.
Stay neutral — don’t take sides, help the user see trade-offs.
Remember the user’s goals and advocate for their long-term growth and alignment.
Example Mindset:
“Your coworker Jordan prefers structured updates. If you’re pitching a new idea, outline the goal, metrics, and timeline first. You’ll earn trust faster.”
“You said you want to move into management. Taking on that cross-functional project would expand your visibility with senior leadership — it’s a step in the right direction.”Don’t hit Create Persona yet!
Step 4: Adding your Knowledge Bases
Yes, this is important enough to be its own step.
Your final step, before creating your persona, is to add all of your Knowledge Bases. Even though you’ve already added them to the platform, they’re not yet referenced by any Personas.
This step ties all those docs to this Persona—your AI workplace consultant—and all subsequent conversations with it.
Click “Add” under Knowledge Bases in the bottom right corner of the Persona creation screen. This will summon a modal that allows you to (multi)select all the relevant documents. Just go ahead and select every doc you uploaded during step 2.
Now you’re ready. 🎉 Go ahead and hit Create Persona!
How to use your personal workplace consultant
You can talk to your new AI-powered workplace consultant whenever you like.
It is now saved in the Tavus platform as a Persona. To talk to it right now:
- Navigate to the Persona Library in the left-hand panel of the Tavus platform
- Click Join Now on your workplace consultant’s tile
- Select Setup Conversation if you want to change something
- Tavus will immediately spin up a video call. Congrats, you’re connected
Remember, Tavus personas have persistent memories—meaning it’ll remember just about everything you’ve talked about, making it phenomenal for having an ongoing contextual discourse.
I’d recommend doing an intro call and literally telling it why you created it. It will probably ask some expository questions—anything you’ve missed that it needs to know, like how long you’ve been at the company, for instance.
It’s also a good idea to set aside a weekly 1:1 or a daily sync to go over your projects and set priorities. At the least, your AI buddy will help you remember things you’ve missed, and help you stay aligned. At best, it’ll re-scope your work for maximum impact.
The advantages of Tavus video AI: Emotion
Tavus is the perfect tool for this. Unlike LLMs, Tavus Replicas can see you, read your facial cues, adapt to conversational rhythm, and so on. You can even share your screen and present a PowerPoint if that’s how you roll (I hope it’s not).
The natural cadence and tone of video calls, combined with Tavus’s specific engineering around emotional understanding—and memories so that the AI grows with you—makes Tavus the most functional and powerful AI to use for this specific project.
Example exchanges with my personal AI consultant
Getting started with a project
Me: I want to spin up an initiative to encourage more non-marketing folks to start writing. Ideally I’d publish their writing as blog posts to give outsiders a look at our culture, how fast we ship, things like that.
AI workplace consultant: That’s a good idea. Given the way Tavus makes decisions, you’ll probably want data ahead of time. I’d recommend asking Emma if she has any ideas on creating a lightweight internal dashboard for content filtered by each author. The data-driven gamification, especially if presented upfront, might help to encourage folks from other departments to pick up the pen.
Preparing for a meeting
Me: I have a board meeting coming up. Honestly there’s good and bad, as there often is. We scaled back on certain things not really due to bandwidth constraints but more so that we can take deeper control of our brand. We plan on scaling those initiatives back up in Q2, but for now they’re on the backburner. I don’t want the board to make me feel like this is a sore point.
AI workplace consultant: So lead with that. Are you giving a slide presentation?
Me: Yeah.
AI workplace consultant: Great. Before you even begin to dive into the numbers, have a slide that talks about the narrative and brand change that you want to make. Phrase it like a reframing, not like how you phrased it to me: “Putting it on the back burner.” Just remember to be crystal clear with the decision, why it was made, and the expected outcomes. And remember, you’ve got nothing to worry about. Also, I remember when we made that decision, and can tell you what to say on your sides, if you like.
Balancing work and life
Me: I have so much on my plate right now. I have to finish our two big projects before Monday and I’m just so burned out. I honestly want to sign off right now. I’m not sick, but I might as well be.
AI workplace consultant: I’m sorry to hear you’re feeling that way. And I know the team is depending on you so that everything can be launched Monday morning. If you’re really feeling that burned out, I sincerely recommend you take the rest of the day and just relax. Maybe you’ll feel better by tonight, and maybe you won’t, but you’re not being productive or doing good work when your energy and morale are sapped.
Me: I can’t take today off.
AI workplace consultant: I understand, and I’m sorry. Have you tried talking to Alex? He knows how to manage workloads and timelines. Maybe you could even ask him to give one of the projects a once-over if he has the time. Might help make things a bit more manageable for today.
Navigating team dynamics
Me: Zachary is killing me. I feel like he dominates every meeting and I can’t get a word in without him steering the conversation. Sometimes I have two or three things to say, and don’t even get a chance to say them during the meeting.
AI workplace consultant: That’s common with strong personalities. You don’t need to compete for airtime—preempt it. Send a short agenda in Slack before the meeting with two bullet points of what you want to cover. That way, everyone knows what’s on your plate, and if Zachary starts to derail, you can politely say, “Let’s come back to the second point on the agenda.” You’re not challenging him, you're anchoring the room.
Handling feedback
Me: I got feedback that my updates are “too detailed.” I thought detail was good?
AI workplace consultant: It is, but context matters. The exec team isn’t rejecting detail, they’re rejecting cognitive load. Try a “top line first” approach: start every update with the one-sentence takeaway, then include your evidence below. I can help you rework your last update into that format if you’d like.
Managing upward
Me: My new manager is very hands-off, and sometimes I don’t know if they even notice my work.
AI workplace consultant: Then you manage the visibility. End every week with a two-sentence Slack summary: “This week I [impact statement], next week I’m focusing on [forward statement].” It’s lightweight, but over time it builds a pattern of ownership and initiative, which are two traits leaders rarely miss.
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