The AI Team Weekly: Manufacturing Goes AI-Native
This Week's Highlights
✨ Manufacturing company builds 8+ AI tools in a single day
✨ ROAM: The tool that replaces your entire productivity stack
✨ ChatGPT's new Agents feature changes everything
✨ Worth Knowing: Why movement breaks actually matter
🏭 Implementation Spotlight: Manufacturing Goes AI-Native
Right then. This week we ran a full-day training session for a manufacturing company's leadership team, and honestly, the results were a bit mental.
The Situation: Like most manufacturers, they'd been hearing about AI for months but couldn't see how it applied to their actual work. Fair enough - most AI content is either too theoretical or focused on tech companies. They needed practical tools for their specific departments, not another presentation about what might be possible someday.
What We Built (In One Day):
R&D Department: Project brief creators that transform vague ideas into structured specifications, plus competitor research and positioning tools that pull together market intelligence in minutes rather than weeks
Sales & Support: Automated response drafting system that handles initial customer queries whilst maintaining brand voice and technical accuracy
Marketing: Newsletter and social media content generation tools that understand their industry-specific terminology and compliance requirements
The Approach: We focused entirely on Claude Projects - no faff, no complicated integrations, just practical tools they could start using immediately. Each department head identified their biggest time drain, and we built a solution on the spot.
What Happened Next
By lunchtime, they'd built their first three tools. By end of day, they had eight functioning AI systems deployed across the company. The R&D team used their new brief creator that same afternoon for an actual project.
Key Insight: The barrier isn't AI capability anymore - it's knowing how to structure your specific problems in a way AI can help with. Once you understand that, the tools practically build themselves. No massive budget required, no six-month implementation timeline, just immediate practical value.
🛠️ New Tool: ROAM Replaces Your Entire Stack
We've been testing ROAM for the past fortnight, and it's genuinely replaced seven different tools we were using previously.
What ROAM Actually Does
Think of it as your AI-powered everything workspace. Voice notes that automatically transcribe and organise, meeting summaries that actually capture action items, project management that doesn't require constant manual updating, and document creation that understands context from your previous work.
Try ROAM Free: http://ro.am/try/seth
Why This Matters: Most productivity tools promise to save time but end up creating more admin work. ROAM does the opposite - it works in the background whilst you focus on actual work.
Real-World Use Cases:
Record client calls and get structured notes with action items sorted by person
Drop in voice memos throughout the day that automatically connect to relevant projects
Search across everything you've ever captured using natural language
Generate reports from accumulated project notes without manual compilation
The Trade-Off: It's not the cheapest tool out there, but considering it replaces Otter, Notion, Asana, and several others, the maths works out. Plus, there's a proper free tier to test it properly before committing.
💡 Quick Tip: ChatGPT Agents Just Changed the Game
The New Feature (Launched Yesterday)
ChatGPT can now directly control external tools through natural language. Instead of copying and pasting between ChatGPT and other apps, you can just tell it what you want done.
The Practical Example: Need a design in Canva? Just start your request with "Canva, please create a social media post about..." and ChatGPT handles the entire process - creates the design, adds your content, and gives you the link to edit it.
How This Actually Works:
ChatGPT recognises which external tool you're referencing
It connects to that tool's API automatically
Completes the task within the tool
Returns the result directly in your chat
Try It Yourself:
Open ChatGPT (ensure you're on the latest version)
Connect your external tools in settings (Canva, Google Drive, etc.)
Start requests with the tool name: "Canva, please..." or "Google Drive, find..."
Watch as ChatGPT handles the entire workflow
Why This Matters: This removes the friction between thinking of something and actually doing it. No more switching between tabs, copying prompts, or managing multiple interfaces. Just conversation that gets things done.
📌 Worth Knowing: Movement Breaks
Look, this isn't AI-related. But we help people work more efficiently, which usually means sitting longer. So here's something actually useful from proper research.
The Finding: Breaking up extended sitting with brief movement makes a measurable difference to long-term health outcomes. It's not about sitting being bad - it's about unbroken sitting time that's the issue.
What Actually Works: Short movement breaks every hour or so. Walk to make tea. Stand during phone calls. Take the stairs. Nothing dramatic required - just interrupting the pattern matters more than the activity itself.
Why Mention This: AI tools make it easier to work longer without natural breaks. Seems worth pointing out what the research says, even if most of us will ignore it.
The Source: Proper research from MD Anderson Cancer Center, not wellness blog speculation. Read it here if you're interested: https://www.mdanderson.org/cancerwise/does-sitting-increase-your-cancer-risk.h00-159538456.html
The Reality: If even one person sets an hourly timer to stand up briefly, job done. Most won't, but the information's there if you want it.
🚀 Coming Next Week
Confirmed Coverage: Complete Nano Banana guide with proven prompting templates for business use. Finally, image generation that doesn't look amateur.
Also running another full-day intensive training session, this time for a professional services firm. Will be interesting to see how the approach translates from manufacturing to consultancy work.
Plus, testing some new automation tools for document processing that might finally crack the "pile of PDFs" problem most businesses have. Early results look promising, but we'll reserve judgement until we've put them through proper real-world testing.
Questions Welcome: What specific AI challenges are you facing? Drop us a line and we'll consider covering them in upcoming issues.
Ready to Build Your Own AI Tools?
We're not talking about implementing someone else's generic solution. We're talking about training your team to build exactly what they need, when they need it.
The manufacturing company from this week's spotlight? They're now creating new tools independently. That's the actual goal - capability transfer, not dependency.
Book a Conversation: https://theai.team/
Until next week, keep building practical things. The AI Team
Links:
The AI Team: https://theai.team/
Try ROAM: http://ro.am/try/seth
MD Anderson Research: https://www.mdanderson.org/cancerwise/does-sitting-increase-your-cancer-risk.h00-159538456.html
