Every studio audit we run starts the same way. We follow one real job from the first client email to the final delivery and time every step. Across very different teams, from a 12-person motion studio to a 300-person in-house brand team, the same pattern shows up: roughly a third of production time goes on work that surrounds the craft rather than the craft itself.
That's the work we automate. Here's how we rank it.
How we score each task
Each candidate gets three scores from 1 to 5: hours per month, how rule-based it is (could you write instructions a new junior could follow?) and how costly a mistake would be. High hours, high rules and low mistake cost go to the top of the list.
The 14, ranked
Tier 1: automate this month
- Brief intake and gap-checking. Turning a messy client email into a structured brief and flagging missing specs before kickoff.
- Job and folder setup. Project tool, Frame.io, Drive or NAS folders, all named to your conventions every time.
- Resizing and versioning. Turning one approved master into every aspect ratio, spec and language.
- Transcripts and captions. Speaker-labelled transcripts on ingest, and captions on lock.
- File naming and delivery packaging. Naming files to the client's spec, writing delivery sheets and uploading to portals.
Tier 2: automate this quarter
- Feedback collation. Merging comments from Frame.io, Figma and email into one task list.
- Approval chasing. Polite, well-timed reminders that sound like your producer.
- Status reports. Weekly client updates written from project data.
- Timesheet nudges. Plus alerts when a job's actual hours start running past the estimate.
- Footage logging. Tagging shots by type, subject and quality on ingest.
Tier 3: automate once the basics are in place
- Brand and spec QC. Fonts, logo clear-space, loudness and safe areas.
- Asset search. Natural-language search across your archive.
- Rights and licence tracking. Expiry alerts for music, stock and talent releases.
- Estimate drafting. Based on similar past jobs, then reviewed by a producer.
Rule of thumbIf two different people at your studio do the same task in exactly the same way, it can be automated. If they'd do it differently and both be right, it's craft. Leave it alone.
The 5 we'll never automate
We turn work away when it falls into one of these categories, even when the client asks for it:
- The idea. Concepting, the big creative leap, the thing that wins the pitch.
- Taste and final calls. Choosing the take, the grade or the type. AI can suggest options, but people decide.
- The client relationship. Agents can draft and remind, but the relationship belongs to your people.
- Feedback on people's work. Critique between creatives stays human.
- Anyone's voice or likeness without consent. More on this in our consent rules.
Automation should feel like getting a great assistant producer. Your team should never feel replaced by it.
Where to start
Choose one Tier 1 task that touches every job, usually intake and setup, and automate it end to end before moving on. One pipeline that runs reliably on every job is worth more than five half-finished ones. If you want help choosing, that's exactly what our studio audit does.