Friday client updates drafted from your project board

Where a studio’s week goes

In a small agency, the billable work is design, copy, and strategy. Around it sits a ring of writing nobody bills for. Weekly updates to each retainer client. Briefs pieced together from long email threads. Captions for next month’s calendar. Proposals that start from a blank page every time. The director usually ends up doing most of it, often late on a Friday.

How an AI helper fits in

An AI helper (the industry calls it an agent) is AI set up to do one job the same way every time. For a studio, a good first job is the weekly client update. We connect it to your project board, so it reads the tasks your team ticked off and the ones coming up. It drafts one update per client in your studio’s voice, covering what got done, what’s next, and what you need from them. The director reads each one, adds a line, and sends it.

Saltbush Studio’s Fridays

We work with Saltbush Studio, a six-person design agency in Fremantle with twelve retainer clients. The director used to write all twelve Friday updates by hand from the project board, and it took most of the afternoon. Now an AI helper reads the week’s tasks in Asana and drafts each update. All twelve take the director under an hour. We tried feeding in the team’s Slack as well, but it picked up jokes and half-made decisions, so Slack came out and the board is the only source.

What it can’t see

The AI helper only knows what’s written on the board. If a designer finished something and didn’t tick it off, the update won’t mention it. Saltbush’s updates still can’t say whether a job is over budget, because hours live in a separate app that isn’t connected yet. And anything sensitive, like a missed deadline or a scope argument, is written by a person.

If your Fridays go on client emails, get your AI Starter Plan and tell it where your week goes.

Related

• AI helpers
• Marketing and creative agencies
• Reports that write themselves for agencies
• Asana