There is a specific kind of dread that hits every week when you run a content program on top of running the entire marketing department.
Not the dramatic kind. The slow, creeping kind. Thursday morning, a blank draft, a stack of browser tabs, and the knowledge that somewhere in all of that noise are five stories worth your audience’s time. Finding them, reading enough to know they are the right ones, summarizing them accurately, and layering in your brand perspective before the day gets away from you. That is a real time tax. And as the head of marketing at a growing company, I don’t have time to spare.
I run a weekly LinkedIn newsletter called AI for the SMB. The premise is one I believe in: curating five stories each week that help leaders understand what AI actually means for their business, filtered through a human-first lens. It also includes SkillSpout’s™ take on what to do with it.
The problem was never the writing, that’s my passion. Any time in my day spent doing creative work is what I live for. The problem was everything that came before it. So, I took matters into my own hands, and built a system.
Every Thursday at 1pm, an AI agent kicks off automatically. It pulls that week’s story brief from my Google Drive, cross-references SkillSpout’s Ideal Client Profile and Personas, and narrows a full list of stories down to the five most relevant for our audience: strategic CEOs and owners at growing companies who are curious about AI but have not yet built the structure to use it well. Then it fetches each linked article and writes summaries from the source itself, not from the brief. That matters to me. If something goes out under our brand name, it needs to be accurate.
Each story gets a SkillSpout takeaway, and this is the part I was most protective of when we built it. It is not a restatement of the article. It is what the article means for our specific reader, filtered through our Human-First AI Maturity Model and our brand positioning. Getting this right took some back and forth; the takeaway has to earn its place.
Here is what I want to be clear about: this is not a fully automated newsletter. The agent produces a publish-ready draft. I make it mine. What I did not expect is how much I would enjoy the editorial role once the scaffolding was handled. When you are not buried in tabs, you can actually think.
Start with strategy, not tools. I did not begin by asking what AI could do. I began by mapping exactly what the newsletter needed to accomplish and who it was for. The agent works because it has a clear brief.
Specificity is key. Once I defined what a good takeaway looked like, how the lead-in should sound, and what sources were acceptable, the quality improved fast. The more context you give, the more the output sounds like you.
Finally, human judgment is the last line.
If you are thinking about where AI fits in your content workflow, start with your ICP, your personas, your brand guardrails. Get those on paper before you reach for a tool. Not because the tools are not good, but because a clear brief is what separates “AI-assisted” from “AI-produced,” and that distinction is everything when your name is on it.
My Thursday now has a productivity block that I can fill with the strategy work that I kept trying to get to because the tactical got in the way. To my marketing colleagues, I actually found time! IYKYK 💅🏻.
PS. You can subscribe to the newsletter here.
Interested in building something like this for your own content workflow? This is exactly what we teach at SkillSpout™. Hands-on training that helps your marketing team identify the right workflows, build the right prompts, and create systems that sound like you. Visit skillspout.com to learn more.
Nicole McCaffrey is the Head of Marketing at SkillSpout.