How Blank Metal Transformed AI Adoption from Scattered Experiments to Strategic Practice

When a growing communications consultancy found their team using AI tools inconsistently, they needed more than training. They needed a strategy the whole team could own. Our half-day AI workshop and custom toolset recommendations transformed scattered experimentation into a principled practice that accelerated their work without compromising their creative standards.

The Opportunity

Open Book Communications, a communications consultancy and creative agency, was juggling multiple projects simultaneously and needed to scale quality without burning out their team. While some team members were experimenting with AI tools, there was no shared approach to maximize impact or align with the company’s mission and creative standards.

Leadership faced a critical question: “How do we embrace AI’s potential without chasing novelty or compromising the custom, people-first experience that defines our brand?” They wanted an AI toolset strategy that balanced cost, impact, and security; one that would accelerate their work while staying true to their values.

The Solution

We designed a half-day intensive that combined education, demonstration, and strategic planning tailored specifically to agency workflows.

The workshop preparation began with leadership interviews to map their end-to-end workflow and identify where time, quality, and visibility could improve. Then we brought the entire team together for a hands-on session that made AI accessible and immediately applicable.

We grounded the team in what AI can and cannot do in 2025, covering adoption trends and enterprise context to align on urgency and pragmatic potential. Then we explained the foundations (LLMs, embeddings, and agents) using plain-language visuals so non-technical teammates could participate confidently.

The core of the workshop focused on practical application. We taught a repeatable prompting framework: Clear, Contextual, Constrained, Creative, Calibrated, and demonstrated how small prompt changes lead to dramatically better outputs. Through live demos, we showed ChatGPT in action for research and briefs, Gamma for rapid slide creation, n8n for orchestrating multi-step workflows, and Sora to illustrate where emerging tools are heading. Beyond the workshop, we delivered a toolset strategy and budget mapped to the major components of their workflow that helped Open Book make the investments that would have the biggest impact for the most of their staff.


Looking Forward

The impact was immediate and cultural. Open Book procured licenses for the recommended tools and launched an AI workgroup that became a cross-functional forum where the team shares what’s working, publishes prompt recipes, and reviews experiments against ethics and brand standards.

The team now reports time savings on tasks across their workflow: research syntheses, first-draft copy, slide ideation, and meeting recaps. More importantly, they describe faster starts, more consistent quality, and better visibility into who’s using what and why. AI moved from novelty to a shared, principled practice anchored to client experience and creative excellence.

Founder Sharon Sampson captured the transformation:

“Prior to the session, some people at my business were using some AI tools in some ways, some times...but it felt more like novelty than strategy. Now we have unlocked greater knowledge, actionable next steps, and a sharper point of view about what to explore and how to think about it, one step at a time.”

Studies show that knowledge workers spend up to 20% of their time searching for information or tracking down colleagues who can help with specific tasks. For creative agencies managing multiple clients and deliverables, this friction compounds quickly. When teams gain a shared language and toolset for AI, they don’t just work faster, they work more confidently, with less second-guessing and more room for the creative work that defines their value.

Is your team stuck between scattered AI experiments and strategic adoption? Let’s talk about building an approach your whole team can own.