Manual to agent: Designing the brief that designs itself.

Users weren't navigating the wizard the way it was designed. They were skipping fields, going back and forth, and — most tellingly — treating the one free-text field as a chat box. They'd type, generate, review, retype. They had turned a brief into a conversation. My job was to make the product catch up.

The original brief was a single long-form page — source content, a creativity slider (Basic → Wild), output settings, variant count. Everything visible at once. The AI worked entirely in the background; users made selections, hit generate, and received output. No freeform input. No back-and-forth. No indication the AI had interpreted anything. It treated ad creation like a form. Users treated it like a fight.

The second generation broke the single page into an 8-step wizard: Ad Type → Ad Source Content → Ad Source → Inspiration → Traits → Creative Direction → Variants → Review. The most significant addition was Step 6: a freeform Ad Concept field where users could describe the brief in their own words, paired with their Brand Kit.

But users immediately routed to that one field — rushing through steps 1–5 to get there, then iterating in the prompt box, completely bypassing the structured inputs. The wizard was 8 steps. The real interaction was happening in one box. When a system provides both structured and free-text input, users gravitate toward whichever feels most expressive. The structured fields became overhead.

The third generation inverted the mental model entirely. Instead of a form that ends in AI, it's a conversation that begins with AI. A chat-based agent moves through the brief collaboratively — mixing quick structured inputs (image source, brand kit, traits) with open prompts (inspiration, concept direction). Then, crucially, the agent proposes the creative direction itself. It surfaces a full draft brief based on everything collected and asks: “Are there any changes you'd like to make, or would you like to use this creative direction?”

The user can edit, redirect, or simply say “I approve.” The cognitive load shifts dramatically — instead of starting from a blank box, the user reacts to a proposal. Curation is faster, lower-stakes, and more collaborative than creation from scratch.

The Gen 3 conversational agent was presented internally and demoed to select clients, who described the experience as briefing a creative collaborator rather than operating a tool. The work contributed directly to Copley's evolving identity as an AI-native marketing agent — a direction the company formalized publicly in early 2026 with the launch of its always-on performance marketing platform.