Ask most agencies whether they use AI and you’ll get one of two answers. Either a vague gesture at “leveraging cutting-edge tools,” or a slightly defensive “everything is handcrafted,” delivered in the tone of someone hiding a laptop behind their back.
Here’s ours, in full, with the reasoning. This is the actual list: what AI touches in our work, what it never touches, and why the line sits where it does. If you’re a client, this is what you’re paying for. If you’re a competitor, honestly, copy the approach. The industry would be better for it and we’d love the company.
What AI does at Clavis
Transcription. Every client call, every customer interview, every video that needs captions. A machine transcribes faster and more accurately than a human at 6pm, and we say this as humans who have tried at 6pm.
Resizing, reformatting, and file conversion. One approved creative becomes nine platform-specific crops without a person pushing pixels around. The judgement was in the original. The rest is math.
First-pass research. When we need the lay of the land, like what competitors are posting or what changed in a platform’s algorithm this week (something always has), AI gathers the raw material. It never gets the final word on what any of it means.
Drafting variations. Once a human has written and approved an original caption or subject line, AI generates the versions we test against it. The voice was set by a person. The permutations are homework.
Report assembly. Pulling your numbers from five dashboards into one document. The machine compiles. It does not conclude.
Tagging and organizing. Content libraries, asset folders, message triage. Filing is not strategy, no matter how colour-coded.
What AI never does at Clavis
It never talks to your audience. Every comment reply, every DM, every community interaction comes from a person. When someone real reaches out to your brand, they deserve someone real back. This one is not negotiable and never will be.
It never sets strategy. What to say, who to say it to, when, and why. Those decisions are the entire job. Automating them isn’t efficiency. It’s quitting with extra steps.
It never handles anything sensitive. Complaints, crises, apologies, bad news. If a message could hurt someone or cost you trust, a human writes every word of it, slowly, probably after a walk around the block.
It never publishes. Nothing goes out under your name, or ours, without a person reviewing and approving it. Human final sign-off isn’t a step in our process. It’s the floor the process stands on.
It never invents. No statistics we didn’t verify, no testimonials that don’t exist, no “studies show” without an actual study. If we can’t source it, we don’t say it. This rule has killed some very punchy sentences. Worth it.
Why the line sits here
The split isn’t arbitrary, and it isn’t vibes. Every task above went through the same three questions: does it carry voice or values, would a mistake cost trust, and is it mechanical with a clear right answer. The full reasoning lives in our post on the credible middle.
Something we noticed after drawing the line publicly: it’s not really a constraint on the work. It’s a constraint on the temptation to cut corners quietly, which is the version of AI adoption that actually wrecks brands.
The part where we admit the hard cases
Not everything sorts cleanly, and pretending otherwise would defeat the point of this post.
Long-form drafting is genuinely hybrid. AI often produces early structure and raw material, and then a human argues with it, rewrites it, and owns the result. This post worked that way, including one round where the human rejected the draft entirely for not sounding like us. Repurposing is hybrid too: a machine can suggest where to cut a long video, but a person picks the moment that actually lands.
We revisit the line as tools change. What stays fixed is that the line exists, it’s written down, and you can hold us to it.
Hold your own vendors to this
Whether or not you ever work with us, ask anyone doing your marketing three questions. Which tasks does AI handle in your work for me? Which will it never handle? Who signs off before something goes out under my name?
A good partner answers in specifics. A vague answer is also an answer.
If you’d rather have the line in writing, steal our Honest AI Policy. It’s one page, and adapting it takes an afternoon, most of which is arguing about the hard cases. That’s the productive part.