Pitches, delivery and staffing are decided in three separate meetings, so margin leaks quietly through scope creep and over-serviced retainers. Each morning the leadership team sees which jobs are bleeding hours, who is overbooked, and which pitches are worth the effort.
A worked example for a typical Malaysian Marketing & Creative Agency, not a description of any real company. Go through the six stages in order: paste each prompt into Claude, check the answer against how your business really works, then continue. Change the profile at the start to match yours.
Stage 1 of 6
Map how the operation really runs
Act as an operations consultant. I run a Marketing & Creative Agency in Malaysia. Profile: A mid-sized integrated marketing agency in Malaysia — ~80 active accounts, ~120 staff (creatives, strategists, account managers), KL/PJ + Penang offices, ~RM 40M annual revenue.
Interview me, one question at a time, to map how decisions actually get made today. Cover: the recurring meetings and reports, who decides what, which numbers people trust, and where decisions are late or made on gut feel.
Known friction: Profit per hour vs. Full calendars; Craft vs. Deadline; Experienced hands vs. Training juniors; Chasing pitches vs. Serving clients; Biggest brands vs. Best-fit clients.
After 8 to 10 questions, summarise the five decisions that cost us the most when made late, in a table: decision, current owner, current delay, cost of delay.
Stage 2 of 6
Design the specialist agents
Using the decision map above, design 5 specialist AI agents for our Marketing & Creative Agency: Pitch-Value, Retainer Health, Bench, Toolstack, Client Mix.
For each agent give: the one question it answers every day, the data it reads, what it may recommend, what it must never do alone, and the format of its output.
Starting points for what each should watch:
- Pitch-Value: pipeline win-rates, pitch cost vs. fee, which RFPs to chase or skip
- Retainer Health: job status, scope creep, overdue approvals, margin per retainer
- Bench: utilisation by role, freelancer spend, senior/junior mix per job
- Toolstack: licence seats, render/AI tool spend, asset-library hygiene
- Client Mix: client health, churn signals, upsell windows, concentration risk
Keep every agent narrow. If an agent covers two jobs, split it.
Stage 3 of 6
Wire up data and compliance
For the agents above, list the data feeds needed. Likely systems: Project-management tool (job and timesheet data); Accounting system (invoices, WIP, retainers); CRM (pitch pipeline); HR roster and freelancer ledger.
Output a table per agent: field, source, how often it refreshes, data-quality risk, and what the agent should do if the feed is stale or missing. Mark every personal-data field and say how to minimise it.
Rules we operate under: PDPA 2010 for client and campaign data; client NDAs; tax and SST treatment of freelancer payments.
End with a short list of actions that always need human sign-off.
Stage 4 of 6
Design the morning brief
Design the single daily brief that pulls the 5 agents together for the CEO, ready before the first meeting of the day.
Specify how the brief merges overlapping or conflicting recommendations, how it ranks items (impact, urgency, reversibility, confidence), and the exact fields per item: what to decide, recommended action, evidence, owner, deadline, and the cost of doing nothing.
Then write a realistic sample brief of five items. Items might resemble: Decline the RM 1.2M tender: pitch cost 3x the usual and win-rate under 15% / Move two senior designers off Account C to Account F before the Friday deadline / Raise the retainer on the account running 40% over scope.
Stage 5 of 6
Build and automate it
Turn the design into a working automation for our Marketing & Creative Agency.
Needs: a scheduled daily run; the 5 agents run in parallel and each saves structured JSON; a final step reads them all and sends the brief by email or chat; every run is logged with inputs, outputs and cost.
Propose the build with Claude plus a workflow tool (for example n8n or the Claude Agent SDK). Give the steps in order, what happens when a data feed fails, and a human-approval step before anything that spends money or makes a customer commitment.
Stage 6 of 6
Roll out and measure
Write a rollout plan for the Marketing & Creative Agency agent team that starts small and earns trust.
Stage 1: one agent, advisory only, run alongside the current process. Stage 2: add the other agents. Stage 3: switch on the daily brief. Stage 4: let agents prepare low-risk actions for approval.
For each stage give duration, owners, what "ready to move on" means, and the metrics to track: time to decision, how often recommendations are accepted, hours saved, and errors caught. Close with the three biggest risks and how we contain them.
