We recently published a really powerful customer story featuring Sarah Ogalla, Creative Operations Director at a leading North American hardware retailer. The success story is packed with simple process improvements and Wrike-related wisdom for in-house creative teams, and I hope you’ll hop over and read it in its entirety.
But today, I wanted to draw attention to another angle that’s super powerful for teams looking to implement AI agents into their workflows: eliminating disruptive workflows and protecting deep work.
Every creative team has a version of the same interruption: a colleague from another department pings a designer for something small. A subject line. A headline tweak. A quick rewrite of a product description so it "sounds more on-brand." I can attest, as a copywriter, tiny requests really disrupt my concentration when I’m working on a larger piece.
Individually, these requests take two minutes, but when you multiply them across a growing organization, they become a constant drain on the people you hired to do important creative work.
That was the problem facing the in-house creative team at a leading North American hardware retailer, which serves more than 5,000 retailers globally. In the past, the creative team would have been limited in their options: stick with status quo and head towared burnout, hire more designers, or tell other departments they were at capacity.
In the age of AI agents, the team had another option: build an AI agent that could answer the small stuff without interrupting the creative team, thereby freeing designers to focus on the work only they can do.
Death by a thousand (digital) papercuts
The creative team at this North American hardware retailer is lean by design: about 30 people covering print, digital, and creative operations for thousands of stores. That leanness means prioritizing time is paramount, especially from the constant stream of fiddly requests and fixes that suck up time and distract from the more critical projects.
"AI alone cannot replace the human touch required for real consumer connection, but it is incredible for removing the mundane," says Sarah Ogalla, Creative Operations Director at the retailer. Mundane requests, such as “Can you write me an email headline?” turned out to be a solvable brand voice issue for Sarah’s team — using Wrike.
A brand voice agent trained on 60 pages of brand guidelines
Most brands have a comprehensive brand guide somewhere in a shared drive, but not all of them make good use of that valuable book of knowledge.
This creative team actually had sixty pages covering colors and fonts, voice, tone, customer profile, and brand vision — a huge wealth of brand knowledge that they had previously been the only ones using. Once they realized they could turn their brand guidelines into a living tool that saved them considerable time, they unlocked a whole new level.
They built a custom Brand Voice Agent inside their existing Wrike and Microsoft Copilot ecosystem, loaded with the full brand guide and a host of supporting assets. Now, when someone on the email team needs a subject line, or someone in another department needs a quick headline option, they can query the agent directly, alongside the relevant brief and project details already living in Wrike.
The output is far from generic AI copy; it’s copy shaped by the same guidelines that inform every other piece of the brand’s voice. And it’s available the moment someone needs it, not whenever a designer has a free minute between real design work.
Interruptions removed, creativity protected
And while speed is nice for everyone involved, that’s not where the real value lies for the creative team. The value comes down to the creative team being able to focus their time and attention, uninterrupted.
Sarah was clear about the role Wrike played in delivering that reality: "By leveraging technology and automating repetitive clicks and task handoffs in Wrike, we’ve actively reduced cognitive load, freed up bandwidth, and built an environment of sustainable performance and growth."
That’s the real cost of small interruptions: the cognitive tax of context-switching in and out of deep creative work all day. Every time a team member stops to write a subject line, they’re spending two minutes on the task — plus the added time it takes to get back into what they were actually working on.
By routing the small, repetitive requests to an agent instead of a person, the team saved time and they protected the conditions their creatives actually need to do good work: fewer interruptions, more sustained focus, more room for ideas that need space to develop.
AI as a force multiplier, not a replacement
It would be easy to read this as "AI is coming for entry-level creative tasks," but that’s not the philosophy at play — and it’s worth being precise about the distinction, because it’s the difference between AI that helps a creative team and AI that undermines one.
"AI is a force multiplier," Sarah explains. "It is there to help us remove the mundane, to remove the time, and help multiply the force of what we can deliver." Multiplying, of course, is very different from replacing. This team’s Brand Voice Agent doesn’t make creative decisions that humans can and do all day long. Instead, it simply produces options grounded in established brand parameters, so a human can decide what actually gets used.
That distinction matters because AI, by its nature, has real limits here. It can’t originate a new creative idea, understand the emotional nuance of a specific customer moment, or know when the "on-brand" answer isn’t the right answer for this particular audience.
Those judgment calls stay with people.
What changes is which requests reach a person’s desk in the first place — the agent handles the repeatable, template-shaped ones so humans can spend their attention on the ones that actually require a human.
The real value of AI
You don’t need a sprawling AI transformation initiative to get real value out of AI. This retailer’s Brand Voice Agent works because it solves one specific, well-scoped problem: small, repetitive, brand-voice requests that were pulling the creative team away from its actual work. It’s trained on something the organization already had (a brand guide), it lives inside tools the team already uses (Wrike and Copilot), and it draws a clear line between what AI handles and what stays human.
For any creative team drowning in small requests, this customer success story is a far more useful starting point than a blanket goal of shoehorning AI in wherever possible. Sarah’s Brand Voice Agent makes clear that your starting point should be to find the requests that are repetitive, low-judgment, and already governed by a documented set of rules. Then, let an agent handle those so your people can get back to the work only they can do.
If you’re interested in cutting out disruptions and protecting deep work for your team, try Wrike. We’ve got a free two-week trial with your name on it.
