The AI advice you're getting is wrong

Welcome to ISSUE #001 of MADE WITH MACHINES - the weekly newsletter for creative people using AI in creative ways. It’s great to have you here!

My goal here is simple. To send you one email per week that makes you do one of three things:

• build something with AI
• stop building something with AI
• change how you think about AI in your own work

This is not a 'pro-AI hype' manifesto. This is my honest take on some interesting ways AI can be used to streamline, amplify, or reimagine creative work. Simple as that.

Used well, it's the most powerful creative tool to come along in decades. Get it wrong and you've just successfully automated your ability to produce garbage at scale.

Each week, you will hear about how a real creative professional is using AI in their work. These aren’t hypothetical use-cases, these are real workflows being used for real work in the real world. And what’s more - you’ll also get the full step-by-step playbook so you can swipe their learnings and deploy them for yourself.

Direct, actionable insight that you can implement today.

Let's get into it. And since it's issue #001, I'll start with something I built myself.

The problem with AI advice for creative businesses

Here's something I keep seeing. A designer, a studio owner, a content creator - they know AI matters. They've read the headlines. They've tried a few tools. They might even be paying for a handful of AI subscriptions they barely use.

But they don't have a plan. Not a real one.

And it's not their fault. The advice out there is either impossibly vague ("integrate AI into your workflows!") or impossibly broad (another list of 40 tools with no context on which ones actually matter for your specific business).

The result is analysis paralysis. You know you should be doing something with AI. You just don't know what.

So you do nothing - or worse, you try to do everything. Sign up for six tools, watch twelve YouTube tutorials, and end up more overwhelmed than when you started.

This is the problem that the big management consultancies solve for large companies. Firms like McKinsey, BCG, and Deloitte don't hand a Fortune 500 CEO a list of AI tools and say "good luck." They run a structured diagnostic. They audit the operations. They find the specific bottlenecks where AI will actually move the needle. They build a phased roadmap with measurement built in from day one.

That process typically costs six figures.

I do a version of this work myself - I help creative businesses figure out where AI actually fits into their operations and build the systems to make it happen. But I kept running into the same situation. People would reach out who clearly needed a plan, but weren't quite at the stage where a full consulting engagement made sense. They didn't need me to build the system for them. They just needed someone to tell them what to build and where to start.

So I built a tool that does exactly that.

What I built

I built an AI-powered strategy consultation that interviews you about your business for 45 minutes and produces a personalised AI implementation roadmap - an 18-page PDF telling you exactly which AI workflows to build first, what they'll cost, and how to know within 30 days whether they're working.

It runs inside a Claude Project - a workspace on Anthropic's AI platform where you can give the AI a defined role, a body of reference material, and a structured way of interacting with you. When you open the project and start talking, you're not chatting with a generic AI. You're running a guided consultation with something that's been trained on a very specific methodology.

Most people use Claude Projects for lightweight stuff - a writing assistant, a research helper. I used it to build a full strategic diagnostic.

What's under the hood

The strategist runs on roughly 740 lines of custom instructions that define its methodology, the exact sequence of questions it asks, and how it processes your answers. Behind those instructions sit 14 reference files containing over 12,000 lines of source material.

That material draws on six published consulting frameworks from BCG, McKinsey, Accenture, Deloitte, PwC, and A16Z - the same frameworks Fortune 500 companies pay seven figures to have applied to their business. I adapted them for creative businesses and small operators.

The system also includes ten business archetype profiles (because a solo freelance illustrator has completely different bottlenecks to a 15-person video production house), an eight-layer model of creative operations, a library of bottleneck patterns mapped to specific business types, deep-dives on 30+ current AI tools with real pricing, and ready-made implementation packs.

When you start the consultation, it doesn't dump all of this on you at once. It runs a structured interview across five stages - and tailors it to your specific needs.

The five stages

Stage 1: Map.

The strategist classifies your business into one of ten archetypes: solo freelancer, boutique studio, small agency, mid-size studio, content creator, in-house creative lead, photography studio, video production company, UX/product design firm, or brand consultancy. Everything that follows is tailored to that classification. Not a creative business? There's a generalist path that covers SaaS, ecommerce, professional services - same depth, different lens.

Stage 2: Audit.

The strategist walks through eight layers of your operations - from how you take in briefs, through research, ideation, production, quality control, delivery, distribution, and measurement. For each layer, it's identifying where friction actually lives in your day-to-day. Not where you think it lives. Where it actually lives. At the production layer, it asks what I call the "rewiring question": if you could redesign this workflow from scratch with AI at its centre, what would it look like? That single question tends to surface the real bottleneck.

Stage 3: Prioritise.

Three calibration questions about your budget, risk tolerance, and time horizon. Then it ranks your top three opportunities by impact and ease of implementation. High impact and easy to build goes to the top. High impact but complex gets flagged for later.

Stage 4: Redesign.

This is the most important stage. The strategist doesn't just suggest "use AI for your briefs." It redesigns the workflow from scratch around the AI. There's a meaningful difference between bolting a tool onto a broken process and rebuilding the process with the tool at its centre. For example: one test consultation took a freelance designer spending three hours per project translating messy discovery call notes into structured creative briefs - and replaced that entire step with a system that turns a call transcript into a brief and three creative directions in twenty minutes. The bottleneck wasn't the design work. It was the admin before the design work even started.

Stage 5: Output.

The strategist generates your deliverable. An 18-page personalised PDF report.

What's in the report

Your report contains:

• an executive summary identifying the single most important finding for your business.
• an AI maturity placement showing where you sit today and where the roadmap takes you in 90 days.
• the full eight-layer audit with severity ratings.
• your top three opportunities, each with a redesigned AI-powered workflow.
• a twelve-week build sequence broken down by week.
• a Phase 1 Implementation Pack with a specific tool recommendation, step-by-step setup instructions, and ready-to-paste configuration - with both a free path and a paid path so you can pick what fits for you.
• a measurement framework with 30, 60, and 90 day checkpoints, including kill criteria so you know when to stop investing time in something that isn't working.

You also get four starter files pre-populated from your consultation - a house style document, a brief template, example outputs, and a project archive template - ready to plug into whatever system the strategist recommends you build.

The whole thing runs on a free Claude account. No paid subscription needed. No technical skills. Five minutes of setup, 30-45 minutes of conversation, and you walk away with a plan built around you and your business.

Why I'm telling you all of this

Because the format of this newsletter is: give you all the info you need to build it yourself.

Everything I've described above - the five-stage structure, the eight-layer audit, the archetype system, the rewiring question, the output format - is the playbook. You could take these principles, create your own version of this consultation, and get real value from it.

It would take you a while. The instructions alone took weeks to refine. There's a failure modes file that exists because the first fifteen versions broke in ways that needed guardrails. The PDF generator went through multiple rewrites. The archetype profiles were tested against real consultations. But the methodology is here - no gatekeeping.

If you'd rather skip the build and just run the consultation yourself, I normally sell the complete bundle: system instructions, all 14 knowledge files, the PDF generator, and the setup guide - for $39.

But you're here in issue #001. You signed up before there was anything to read.

So this one's yours. Pay what you want - including FREE:

GET THE AI STRATEGIST IN A BOX →

No minimum. If it's useful, pay what you think it's worth. If you're not sure yet, take it for free and decide later. It's yours either way.

Set it up. Run the consultation. Build your Phase 1. And if you do - I'd love to hear what your strategist found. Hit reply and tell me your number one bottleneck. I read every response.

Catch you next week.

Sam

P.S. I want to feature real creative professionals using AI in their work. Not influencers rehashing tool lists - people actually building workflows and systems. Designers, editors, studio owners, content creators, freelancers. If that's you, or you know someone, drop me a line at hello@madewithmachines.com. Every issue needs a case study. Yours could be next.