Superside

Problem

Starting from the recently launched Service Catalog, which was a huge step towards information-rich briefs, we saw that it was only the tip of the iceberg. Even though briefs started to arrive as a complete and ready to execute documents, we heard from customers that they still needed to repeat themselves on every project. They expected our Project Managers and Creatives to know about the brand and recurrent work, acting more proactively and autonomously.

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Goals

This context felt like the perfect opportunity to introduce our first set of AI tools, and position the business as an AI-first company following the emergence of a new era in technology, business, and products.

As AI became a serious conversation inside the company, closing that gap called for two stages:

1. First, a generative briefing tool that could get something customer-facing into the market quickly and surface real usage patterns;
2. Then, a customer knowledge layer that let generation grow out of the data that first stage revealed.

The team started with the generative tool, treating it as the fastest way to learn what personalization actually needed to account for.

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Solution

AI Briefing doubled down on what the Service Catalog and custom brief forms started to solve: the blank canvas anxiety was gone. Customer interviews conducted prior to and after the launch, along with usage data, proved this was the right direction. From simple and not-so-structured prompts, it was possible to generate an entire brief ready for final edits and submission.

Brand Brain, a knowledge database that contained historic information from customers in multiple categories, came to aggregate even more — not only generating highly customized briefs and serving as context for multiple AI tools yet to come, like on-brand asset generation (Brand Models), but also becoming the biggest selling proposition of the business.

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Where the design work lived

Brand Brain was built as infrastructure for AI agents first, interfaces second — which meant the highest-leverage design decisions weren't visual, they were about trust:

• Sourcing, not guessing. Every piece of generated content in a brief links back to where it came from — a past project, a stated preference, a brand guideline. Both the customer requesting the brief and the Creatives executing it can see the reasoning, not just the output.
• Surfacing gaps instead of filling them. When the system didn't have enough signal to generate a field with confidence, it said so — explicitly — rather than filling the blank with a plausible guess. A flagged gap costs a few seconds of human input. A confident hallucination costs a misdirected project and an unhappy customer. This became a hard design principle for the team, not a fallback.
• Guided input over open conversation. Every AI interface defaults to a chat box. We chose not to make that the primary path here: describing context in a paragraph and hoping the model infers the right thing is slower and less certain than clicking to point at exactly what you mean. The product lets users add context — past projects, references, people to tag — through direct, structured actions instead of prose. The chat still exists as an orchestrator underneath, routing requests to the right flow, but it's not where the user does the work of specifying intent.
• A workspace, not a black box. Once a brief is generated, the customer lands in a collaborative document to fill remaining gaps, comment, and refine alongside their team — rather than treating the AI's output as final.

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Results

• 45% of Superside's customers were actively using Brand Brain and AI Briefing within about a year
• 80% faster time-to-start on project drafts

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Learnings

The sequencing taught the team something that's easy to miss in hindsight: breadth and depth aren't sequential trade-offs you can skip past, they're both load-bearing. Shipping a generic tool first wasn't wasted time — it proved, with real usage data, that personalization was the actual constraint, not a nice-to-have. That validation made the case for Brand Brain far stronger than it would have been as an untested proposal. The lesson the team carried forward: sometimes the fastest way to prove a foundational bet is right is to first ship the thing that reveals why it's necessary.

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