Workshop’s evolving approach to AI

When you open up your inbox or scroll social media, AI tools are everywhere. It isn’t always easy to tell which ones solve real problems and which are marketing fluff.

Over the years, my leadership team and I have made a conscious decision not to tack AI onto our website’s headline just because the market said we should.

AI is a means to an end, not a solution. That’s an important distinction in the age of AI. If a problem is more effectively solved with AI, we’ve leaned in, but only when it made sense. Ultimately, we’re focused on building a great product, not just an “AI” product. A great product is what you expect, whether or not it’s powered by AI.

Still, we know AI creates a unique opportunity to solve problems that have historically been elusive. With that in mind, last year I elevated “Lead with AI” to one of our strategic pillars.

That pillar wasn’t exclusive to our product team. Just like you, we’ve been learning what’s useful and what’s noise, and how to bring an entire company along without leaving anyone behind. We’ve since rolled AI into how every team at Workshop works. We added an AI Operations role to guide that internally, and we host regular training sessions so Workshoppers across departments have support figuring out how AI can improve their own workflows.

Through this learning, we’ve discovered where AI makes the biggest impact for our internal teams, and that has shaped our product vision too. Alongside it, listening to you and partnering closely with you will always inform our roadmap. It’s why we run our Internal Comms Trends Survey every year. This year, the results speak for themselves: AI use among internal communicators like you jumped from 20% to 42% in the last twelve months. That’s more than double in a single year.

It’s safe to say AI has officially moved from “trend” to “tool.”

Your job’s gotten bigger, but your team hasn’t.

From our survey and countless conversations with comms teams like yours, we know you’re often resource constrained. You’re juggling an endless list of tasks and daily fire drills, often supporting organizations of thousands of employees with a very small (but mighty!) team. In fact, that same survey highlights that two-thirds of communicators work on a team of three or fewer, and only 44 percent feel they have the resources they need to deliver on their strategy. 

Better alignment across leadership, a faster read on what’s actually happening, comms that land instead of just going out: none of that has changed. What’s changed is how much of it now falls on your same-size team. You’re not short on ideas, just on hours to make them happen.

That’s the gap we built the latest version of Workshop AI to close.

Good news: your comms team is about to get a whole lot bigger.

Workshop’s platform now supports custom, autonomous AI agents, a way of scaling your work that only AI makes possible. Agents take the busy, repetitive work off your plate so you can spend your time on the strategic work only you can do. And they solve your specific problem, not a watered-down version built for the lowest common denominator, which traditional software is often guilty of.

That’s the power of AI. And that’s why, in partnership with teams like yours, we’ve been chasing this vision for the last few quarters. It’s a problem worth solving.

Custom agents aligned to your business objectives

Cici is always available to help (and isn’t going away!), but custom agents give you full control over how Workshop AI works for you. Depending on what your team needs, that could be an Alignment Reviewer that scans your comms for a given period and flags where leaders are sending contradictory messages. Or an Executive Report Builder that emails your leadership a weekly recap of what went out and how it performed, so you’re not building that deck yourself every Thursday. Maybe it’s a Newsletter Designer that pulls stories from your SharePoint and builds your recurring send in your brand kit. Say goodbye to starting from a blank page!

However you get started, none of it replaces your judgment, and that was never the plan. You’re in control. The agent runs the report; you decide what to do with it. It flags the alignment gap; you know how to close it. Recognition, sensitive news, culture moments: the parts of your job that need real trust and judgment are still yours. That’s what “your team got bigger” actually means. Not more headcount, but more capacity, working alongside you while you set the strategy.

AI Studio: AI tools to help you scale your work

Custom agents are only part of the story. Today, we’re unveiling the next chapter for Workshop AI and our newest product: AI Studio. After countless hours of learning from you and building, we’ve packaged a suite of AI solutions created specifically for you and your comms team.

AI Studio includes custom agents, agent connectors, enterprise-grade AI governance, and unmetered usage. It also includes access to our MCP server, the easiest way to make Workshop work directly in Claude, Copilot, ChatGPT, or your AI tool of choice.

Your role hasn’t stopped evolving, and neither have we. In fact, we’re just getting started! We have an ambitious roadmap of products and features to bring even more power to our AI suite, and we’re excited to share more in the coming months.