Looking for a practical way to adopt AI in your agency? Start with the creative brief, a workflow you run every week.
The obvious first move, now that there is a surfeit of capable models, is to open ChatGPT or Claude, paste the client brief in, ask for a creative brief back, and see what comes out. What comes out usually reads thin.
It reads thin because the tool was never the hard part. The context is. A good brief is the product of several steps that happen before anyone writes a word: setting the project up, pulling together what already exists in past work and brand strategy, gathering market and audience insight, then building the brief, then shaping it into something you can present back. Skip four of those and you get an over-confident first draft with nothing underneath it.
So the shift is to start from the ask rather than the tool. Define the workflow first, then decide where AI helps inside it.
That is what we built the Workflow Planner to do. Describe an agency process, or pick a standard one, and it maps an AI-supported team workflow: which tools, in what order, what each tool is doing, and roughly what the stack costs. It only draws on tools we have reviewed, and it is honest about the steps where we do not yet have a tool that fits.
The creative brief is one of six standard flows in it, alongside estimates, weekly status, reviews and approvals, a social calendar, and versioning ad creative across markets.
Process is one of the five Dimensions the Diagnostic covers, alongside Mandate, People, Infrastructure and Governance. Getting one workflow right is the most useful first step you can take, and a steadier place to start than another debate about which model is winning this month.
The Workflow Planner is free to use, with no sign-up.