Hey there, I'm Devin!
Most of the time you can catch me deep in the world of internal comms at Workshop (yes, the Happy Mondays folks!), and while I love AI, there are just some comms questions that need a human who really gets it… that’s me!
Hi Devin, first off, YOU are awesome. Thank you for supporting the IC community so thoughtfully and giving us so much of your time and brain power. My question is, how are you using AI in your IC workflow and what LLMs are you using? I’m particularly curious to know which agents you’ve built for yourself and which are you sharing with your team. I’m not asking for trade secrets (unless you want to divulge, ha) but would love to hear best practices. Thanks so much for your insight!
Oh my goodness, thank you so much! Seriously, there’s not a day that goes by that I’m not as equally thankful (and in awe, honestly!) of this community.
Alright, now let’s dive into your question… which I would have answered completely differently a year… or heck even six months ago! Which is truly a testament to how fast AI is changing. AI is baked into a pretty good chunk of my current workflow, but I’m regularly evaluating it — personally I don’t want to become too reliant on it (which is very relative!) or automate parts of my job that genuinely bring me joy. So, as it stands, I’m pretty exclusively using Cici (Workshop’s AI assistant for internal comms) and Claude. I realize that’s not a super long list of AI tools, but those are my honest go-tos! Some honorable mentions would be Whisper, Perplexity, Descript, and Notion AI. Full transparency — I sunsetted my usage of ChatGPT a few months back, mostly just a matter of habit and frequency more than anything super dramatic. The more I used Cici and Claude (and that handful of others), the less reason I had to keep bouncing around.
To break that down a little further: Cici is where I live for anything core to the actual job — drafting and sending emails, reviewing analytics, managing campaigns, that kind of day-to-day execution. It’s already trained on so much of the internal comms knowledge Workshop has built up over the years, so I’m not explaining context from scratch or building out instructions for an external tool every time. Honestly, Cici gets the majority of my time these days — it’s gotten really powerful, and there’s just a different feeling using a tool that was built specifically for internal comms versus something general-purpose.
Claude is more where I go for the workflow side of things — cross-checking a strategy before I fully commit to it, or building out something bigger. I keep different Projects set up there, and the way I decide what earns one is pretty simple: what am I doing on a recurring basis? All Hands prep, podcast outlines, any internal email I send more than once… those are the things I don’t want to write a fresh prompt for every single time. If I catch myself doing the same task more than three times, that’s my cue to build a project (or, within Cici, a Skill) around it.
As for agents I’ve built for myself versus what I’ve shared with the team: honestly, almost everything starts as something just for me. I’m the one closest to the recurring work, so I’m the one who knows what’s actually worth automating. Once something’s proven itself (aka I’ve used it enough times to trust the output!) that’s when it’s worth turning into something the team can use too. I’d rather share a few things that genuinely work than hand everyone a pile of half-baked prompts.
That “am I automating something that should stay mine” question matters a lot here. I still write my own asks and edit my own tone by hand for anything that feels personal or high-stakes. I’m using AI to move faster on the repeatable stuff, not to replace the judgment calls that actually make comms good and land with employees.
One more thing worth mentioning: if you don’t have something like Cici internally, you can actually try it right on Workshop’s website, even as a non-customer! It’s backed by a lot of the same internal comms knowledge and benchmark data Workshop’s gathered over the years.
Ask me again in six months and I guarantee this answer looks different — that’s genuinely part of what makes this fun to keep talking about. Best of luck out there, and if you build something cool, I’d love to hear about it!!
