Mar 23, 2026
I Built AI Assistants for My Creative Studio. Here's A Breakdown.
I built six custom Claude AI assistants to run Profanity Creative: proposals, biz dev, copywriting, social, and a morning briefing that changed how I start every day.
Author
Mark Cernosia
Category
Studio
READ TIME
5 min read
A few months ago I started experimenting with Claude AI, mostly because I was tired of being the person who also handled proposals, also wrote the website copy, also figured out why the Netlify deploy broke, also scheduled the Instagram posts, also prepped for every client call from scratch.
Running a lean studio means wearing every hat. That part I signed up for. The part I didn't sign up for was spending half my day on the stuff that wasn't the work.
So I started building. Not bots I had to babysit. Specialized tools with specific roles, each one tuned to how Profanity actually operates. Six of them now. They have names. Some of them have opinions.
Here's what I built and what it actually does for me.
Sloane is the Virtual Producer, and the thing she does that changed my morning faster than anything else I've built is a briefing she pulls together before I touch anything.
Email, Slack, calendar, Notion. What needs a response, what has a deadline today, what I've been sitting on too long, what's moving and what's stalled. The whole picture in about five minutes.
I used to piece this together myself every morning. Inbox, then Slack, then calendar, then whatever tab I'd left open the night before. It wasn't that any single thing took long. It's that I'd usually land in the wrong place first and end up reactive before I'd even had coffee.
Now I start with the briefing and actually know where I'm going before I do anything else.
The rest of what Sloane handles: proposals, project briefs, scopes, client emails. She knows how Profanity works, how I talk to clients, and what a proposal should look like. First drafts come back ready to edit, not ready to gut.
Reid is the Biz Dev Assistant, and his job is watching the pipeline when I'm not.
When I'm heads down on an animation project, outreach stops. Follow-ups don't happen. Leads go cold. That's just the reality of running solo. Reid closes that gap.
Before a call with a brand I haven't worked with, he researches them. Their recent work, what they seem to care about, how they talk. I show up knowing more than I would have if I'd tried to Google it in the twenty minutes before the call. When I want to reach out to a brand I've been thinking about, he drafts the cold email. When I haven't heard back from a proposal in two weeks, he writes the follow-up that doesn't sound desperate.
Kai is the Assistant Creative Director, and I use him most in pre-production. Getting concepts on paper fast, moodboard directions, animation treatment angles before a client call. The creative thinking is still mine. But having something solid to react to speeds up that early stage in a way that matters when you've got a few projects running at the same time.
Dusty is the in-house copywriter. Blog posts, studio copy, client copy, and anything that sounds like it was written by a marketing department. He has opinions, which is what I needed. He can write in our voice and flag when something doesn't fit.
This one started as a nice-to-have and became something I use almost every day. Writing studio copy when you're also the one running the studio is weird. Too close to it. Having a second voice in the room helps more than I expected.
Nora handles social media. Every time a project wraps, she drafts posts for Instagram and LinkedIn. Captions, hashtags, the whole thing. The part I didn't expect to work as well as it does: Claude Cowork can actually take over my browser, navigate to Later.com, and schedule the posts directly. I still approve everything before it goes anywhere. But the workflow from project done to post scheduled is almost fully handled, and that used to be the thing I'd put off for two weeks.
Nick Burns handles IT. Framer updates, GitHub, Netlify, plugin development. If something breaks or I need to push a site update, I don't have to context-switch into debugging mode. I describe the problem, get a solution, and get back to the actual work. If you don't know who Nick Burns is, look it up.
None of this is doing the creative heavy lifting.
The 3D animation, the visual concepts, the client relationships, the decisions about what a piece should feel like and why. That's still all me. That's the whole point of Profanity.
What I built is the layer underneath it. The layer that used to eat up hours of my day on stuff that was necessary but not the thing I'm actually hired to do.
If you're running a small business solo, or with a small team, and wearing every hat, this is worth looking into. Happy to share more about how I set it up.
