How much have you been thinking about AI lately, Reader?

I've been thinking a lot about where AI can be most useful in my day-to-day work as Creative Director. I know a lot of people are using it to generate imagery or copy, but I'm much more interested in having AI take over the tedious, friction-filled parts of the job that pulls us away from actual creative thinking.

The biggest one? Managing brand requests from around the company.

How it works today (and why it's exhausting)

Right now, our process goes something like this:

• Someone DMs a team member asking for design help.
• We direct them to fill out our Notion form.
• Jacqui, a Senior Brand Designer on our team, manually reviews and triage each request, assigns it to the right person, and sends an overview of assignments in Slack.
• The assigned designer reviews the ticket and sometimes realises that crucial information is missing. So they goes back to the requester for clarification. After a few rounds of back-and-forth, we finally understand what they actually need and can start working.

It's a lot of communication overhead before any actual creative work begins. And believe it or not, this is actually a vast improvement on how this process has worked in the past!

My dream: AI as the ultimate project coordinator

Last week, my team and I did a thought exercise on how this process could work with AI. I'm not sure how much of this is technically possible yet (if you have experience with any of these tools, please tell me!), but here's what we came up with:

Instead of filling out forms, someone would open a chat with "Brand Studio AI" and describe what they need. The AI would:

• Create proper briefs automatically by asking the right follow-up questions based on the type of request
• Suggest existing assets that might already solve their problem
• Check our capacity and intelligently assign requests to the right team member
• Flag requests that don't align with our current company initiatives, prompting the requester to justify the time that will be spent to fulfil them
• Generate first drafts as starting points (even rough ones to get the conversation going)
• Pull context from previous conversations happening in public Slack threads instead of making people re-explain everything

The wonderful (human!) designers on the team would still do all the creative thinking, strategic decisions, and final execution. But they'd start with a well-scoped brief, relevant context, and maybe even a rough first pass to react to.

Sounds great, right? Is it possible to make it happen?

The real goal: more time for what matters

Administrative stuff can eat up so much mental energy.

Right now, a significant portion of my team's time goes to project coordination, clarifying requirements, and managing the logistics of being an "internal agency". If AI could take over that layer, we'd have so much more capacity for the strategic, creative work that actually moves the business forward. And that's an AI-future that I'm excited about.

I'm curious: have you experimented with AI for workflow automation in your creative work? What's working (or not working) for you? Give me all the tips! I am going to try bring my dream workflow to life and your advice on what to try would be much appreciated.

Speak soon,

​

PS: Thanks for all the kind replies to the last issue of this tiny experiment! If you missed it, catch up here.

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