How Brainlabs Uses Claude Cowork to Automate Work Across 1,000 Employees

Brainlabs runs media and advertising campaigns for mid-sized and enterprise clients across four continents, with roughly 1,000 strategists, media planners, data scientists, and creative leads operating from offices in the US, UK, LATAM, and APAC. At that scale, a steady cadence of recurring work—drafting creative briefs, QA-ing media plans, pulling client reporting, summarizing campaign data—accumulates quickly across every team.

The company had no practical way to turn recurring workflows into reusable automations without routing every request through engineering. Strategists rebuilt the same briefs by hand, knowledge that lived in individual team members’ heads failed to transfer to the next brief, and quality varied from person to person depending on who ran the work. CTO Ben Vincent’s operating principle—“If you’re doing something more than three times, you should try to automate it”—had no scalable path outside the engineering team.

Brainlabs treated Claude Cowork as the company-wide foundation and Notion as the home for an org-wide skills library. Over four weeks, employees across the workforce—not just engineers—attended workshops and began authoring skills directly in Notion, which packages each skill to GitHub for version control while keeping the Notion page as the source of truth. A “suggest a skill” process let any employee propose a new automation without going through engineering. As the library grew into the hundreds, a skills auditor—itself a Claude skill—reviewed submissions for duplication, overlapping instructions, and token inefficiency, then proposed consolidations. Managed Agents inside Notion now fire automatically when tasks change state on a Kanban board, drawing on the skills library and connectors to Slack, Google Calendar, and other platforms to produce outputs like PowerPoints and research documents.

Four weeks after the rollout began, roughly 400 skills covered everything from SEO audits to client reporting, with 91% of North American employees using Claude. The SEO audit skill—refined across thousands of iterations from the SEO team—standardized work quality that had previously varied by strategist. “It’s one skill, refined across thousands of iterations from our SEO team, that captures the full universe of what to look for and what good looks like,” said Global CEO Dan Gilbert. “It doesn’t rely on what any one strategist happens to remember on the day.”

Brainlabs is now evaluating the Claude Agent SDK for more complex server-side agents to sit alongside the Notion-hosted ones, heading toward a network of proactive agents that expand the team’s capacity for the deep strategic work that grows client businesses.