Module one, and the first target: wireframes drafted with Figma's AI, then taken on by the designer.
Figma
Stays with a person: page layout.
Brand strategy
Research, interview notes and structured briefs drafted with ChatGPT and Claude, and kept in Notion.
ChatGPTClaudeNotion
Stays with a person: positioning.
Editorial design
Image preparation and the repetitive parts of long layouts handed to Adobe's AI, in the Creative Cloud tools the team used.
Adobe Creative Cloud
Stays with a person: page layout, and the client's copy.
Marketing + social
One asset adapted for every channel in Canva and Adobe, with first-draft captions from ChatGPT and Claude.
CanvaAdobe Creative CloudChatGPTClaude
Stays with a person: the copy.
Checkpoint named
The founder's condition was the spine of the curriculum: copy, positioning and page layout stay with a person.
Each module named its checkpoint out loud, at the stage where the judgement sits.
Who knew what
Shadowing showed who already had the skill.
One designer already knew Figma's AI features and held back, expecting the founder to disapprove.
Founder's line
The position the founder agreed, said out loud: AI supports the people doing the creative heavy lifting, and copy, positioning and page layout stay with a person.
Saying it out loud cleared the way for the designer who had been holding back.
Demonstrate
Peter does the task with the tool, in the team's own project files.
Duplicate
The team member does it while Peter watches.
Delegate
They do it, and Peter steps out.
A clear line
The team could see exactly where the machine stopped and they started.
statedDrop back a layer
Where growing pains showed, the answer was to drop back a layer and run the previous step again.
Live job
A client job in one of the offerings, in the agency's own project files.
First pass
The module's technique runs on the heavy task: a wireframe, a research summary, a layout, a set of channel formats.
Checkpoint
The offering's named checkpoint: copy, positioning or page layout. That call belongs to a person.
Person finishes
The designer or strategist takes the work to finished.
A person could take the work back at any stage, which removed the fear that the system would run away with a client's brand.
Reason logged
Every change documented with its reason.
A change with a reason attached can be evaluated later. A change without one can only be repeated or undone.
Better each run
The reasons accumulated, so the process improved from one run to the next.
statedEach run inherits the reasons
The next run starts from the reasons documented on the last one.
A website was never produced in one pass. Each run was better than the last.
29 of 31 daily
29 of 31 people logging their time daily, sustained for months, on a system nobody was required to use.
measuredFounder enforces
The founder began sceptical that AI could touch design.
Naming the checkpoint out loud turned the founder into the person enforcing adoption.
statedPermission given
Once the founder's position was explicit, the designer who had been holding back stopped holding back.
statedSecond agreement
The relationship continued past the first engagement: a learning programme Peter is building for them, live now under its own agreement.
statedSell · Deliver · Train
Every engagement has the same shape:
Sell: finding the real problem, and winning the work
Deliver: building what fixes it
Train: handing it over so the team runs it
When a client gets the value they want, they're more inclined to do more.
Once they see what is possible, they bring their own ideas to the table, ready to be implemented.
The offerings
What the agency sells, broken into the tasks that deliver it, so every task could be logged against a job.
A module each
A module for each offering trained, built around the tasks the time logs showed were eating hours.
The tools the team already used
Where AI takes the first pass
The step that stays with a person, named
Checkpoint named
The founder's condition, written into every module at the stage where the judgement sits:
Copy
Positioning
Page layout
3D handover
Demonstrate, Duplicate, Delegate, in the team's own project files.
Where growing pains showed, drop back a layer and run the previous step again.
Live client work
AI takes the first pass on a live job, a person takes it through the checkpoint, and every change is kept with its reason.
29 of 31
29 of 31 people logging their time daily, sustained for months, on a system nobody was required to use.
measuredEach run inherits the reasons
Every change was documented with its reason, and the next run started from those reasons.
A website was never produced in one pass. Each run was better than the last.
Daily time logs
Each person logged the day against a project and a task within it, in about five minutes.
About three months of daily logs, mapped as a heat map, before any module was built.