Get Work Done Faster with ClickUp AI
Mike Slaby, Strategic Solutions Engineer at ClickUp, shows us the actual use cases of how Click Up AI can eliminate the time consuming tasks from project management so you can focus on the work that matters most.
[MUSIC]
Hello everyone and welcome to Go to Market AI,
the future of your Go to Market tech stack.
I'm your host, Sarah McConnell.
These days, it seems like every company has AI,
but on this show, we want to go a level deeper,
so you can see firsthand how
businesses are actually applying AI to solve your business challenges.
We're going to go deep into the use cases and showing you
live demos of the latest and greatest in AI technology.
Today, I'm really excited to be joined by
Mike Slaby, Strategic Solutions Engineer at ClickUp.
Mike, thank you so much for joining us today.
>> Of course, thank you for having me.
I'm excited to be here.
>> Absolutely. Before we jump in,
I know what the people showed up for is that live demo,
which I promise everyone we're going to get to it.
But before we jump into that, Mike,
can you tell me a little bit about ClickUp?
What do you guys do and tour you helping?
>> Yeah, absolutely.
To give you some background,
ClickUp is an all-in-walled productivity platform.
We were founded in 2017,
and ClickUp's mission is to make people more productive by cutting down
the number of applications you use to get work done.
By doing this, this eliminates the silos that typically
exist between teams because information goes from being
dispersed across your tech stack to being in one single source of truth.
So, ClickUp typically replaces individual workplace tools like spreadsheets,
docs, whiteboards, reporting, and of course, AI.
We've helped over 10 million users across two million teams worldwide,
and this includes all different kinds of teams from marketing,
to product and engineering, to product management.
ClickUp is intentionally flexible to meet the needs of
multiple business units across your company.
>> That's so awesome. I feel like one of the reasons I was so excited to have
you
and ClickUp on Go-To-Market AI is as AI has gotten
more popular, we're hearing more about it.
I feel like the use case everyone is talking about is productivity.
When they're like, "How can you apply AI right now in your business?"
It's generally about generative, but they're like,
"It's really productivity. You can save yourself time and effort."
So, it's really awesome that ClickUp is doing just that,
and I'm really excited to get people behind the scenes look at what that
actually looks like.
Because I hear, "Oh, it helps with productivity."
I'm like, "Okay, great."
But how is it going to help with productivity?
So, Mike, with that being said,
I would love to go behind the scenes and ClickUp,
and check out your guys' AI functionality and really see how is ClickUp helping
people be more productive.
>> Awesome. Let's get started.
The ClickUp roadmap and overall strategy,
I would say boils down to three main categories.
The first of which being content AI,
and this is actually our first release.
It's in GA right now,
and this is the most traditional use of generative AI.
So, it's using AI to write and edit content,
as well as using role-based prompts and actions to create that content.
Next is the project management AI.
And this is what we're currently working on in the process of rolling out,
and this is using AI to really cut back on the work about work.
So, saving you from the tedious updates and meetings
that keep you from doing your actual job.
This will most prominently be within tasks of the list,
because those are the most foundational units of work,
but we're also working on putting this into more products for the ClickUp.
So, using it for things like automations, dashboards, and reports,
as well as whiteboards, which is what we're actually looking at right now.
Then lastly, workplace AI is something that's on our long-term roadmap,
and it's really how we view AI is going to be revolut- revolutionizing
productivity.
So, this is where AI can help you locate institutional knowledge,
and enable you to navigate your day-to-day in just a much more efficient way.
This is all really awesome.
I feel like it touches on a little bit of everything.
We think about productivity and generative AI from the content perspective,
so I'm really excited for you to show us the back end of this.
So, the first place that I'm going to start is with what we call a ClickUp list
And a list is going to be that main container for housing the work that your
team does.
So, you can think of a list as potentially a project with tasks.
It could be a backlog full of Epic's and user stories,
or it could even be your 2024 company objectives and key results.
But within each list, you're able to get complete visibility into the progress
of work,
because each of these work items has attributes for things like status,
start and due date, the time track, as well as things like priority.
So, if we were to click into one of these individual tasks,
you're able to drill in and get a consolidated view of all the information and
communication
surrounding your work.
But getting started on the right-hand side, you're able to have what we call
contextual
collaboration, because this comment thread lives specifically within this task.
So, you have all of that necessary information alongside the communication
aspect,
so it's not disparate or siloed in email or your chat application.
And so, if this is a longer engagement or involves multiple stakeholders,
there could be tons of comments within this given task or project,
and that can be stacked up and really hard to sift through.
In this case, there's only five replies here.
But the idea is that using ClickUp AI, you're able to automatically summarize
comment threads, do the most important updates instantly without having to
spend that time
scrolling through the comment section.
This is so cool.
I just have to pause here, because I feel like any project management tool I've
used,
where I spend the most time is trying to sift through to your point,
like all the comments, and like, I know I'm looking for something in particular
so the ability to summarize all of those to me, I like, I just smiled.
I was like, "Oh, this is crazy."
Right, and we've all been there where you know, like, in your email,
you have something that you need to refer back to, but you just can't find it,
and you have those long threads where it's like, "Okay, I know it's somewhere
in here,
but where is it?"
Right, and this is really just allowing you to get that most important
information
without having to spend that time.
Where you ask G2G to go find it and it laughs at you, and it's like, "Yeah,
that doesn't even exist anymore."
Or, "Look, this is way better."
Exactly.
And with that being said, you also have the ability to actually access this
directly from your inbox.
So, when you get that notification that you've been tagged or at mentioned
within that comment thread,
directly from your inbox, you can actually use the "summerized" capability as
well.
So you don't even have to go directly into the Tasker project to get these
types of updates.
But, outside of comments, there's so much more additional information and
actions
that can be taken within this given piece of work.
So, for example, the status can potentially change.
Dudates might get moved out because there are delays or changes in who's
actually working on it.
You could come in and you could track time as you're working through this task
er project.
The idea is that a lot of things can actually change, and for a manager or
executive,
it can be pretty difficult to actually stay on top of this to know what's
pretty much going on within this project.
So, with ClickUpAI, similar to the comment thread, you can actually get
a instant summary of the overall task or a time-based update based on what's
happened within the last
24 hours, last three days, last seven days. So again, you can get that most
important information
without having to scroll through and see what those different things have
happened within this work.
This is also really cool. Sorry, I keep pausing you because I am so impressed
by this because I feel
like from a manager's perspective, there's so many projects at any given time
that are going on.
And to your point, I'm like, "Well, if I haven't had time to meet with the team
or maybe someone's
out on PTO or whatever, it might be an I can't know the status and I can't
relay that up to my
executive team to have the ability to just go in and have essentially, gener
ative AI tell me what's
been happening. So, I don't have to go piece it together and take all that time
is huge."
Definitely. Yeah, it's really all just about cutting out that noise so that you
just are able to make
the right decisions and be more proactive as opposed to reactive. Yeah, that's
awesome.
So, outside of the summary updates, in ClickUp, with the work that you're doing
, you can templatize
nearly everything. So, if there are repeatable steps in the projects or tasks,
you're typically
going to use a template as a jumping off point. However, if you're starting off
fresh or maybe
you're doing something that's more ad hoc, you can leverage ClickUp AI to
actually break down your
work into sub steps or sub tasks based on the context within the given task, as
well as context
of the other tasks that might live within the list. So, it's going to
automatically generate these
sub tasks. And what you can also do is if you don't want any of these, right,
you review them
and some don't make sense, you can actually very easily deselect them. And when
you create them,
it won't even include the ones that you didn't want there. So, this just takes
a ton of effort
out of creating the project plan and provides a good jumping off point for
mailing down the steps
that are needed to complete this given initiative. That's really cool. So, to
your point, like,
if you do the same project over and over, like I know from our perspective as a
marketing team,
we do a lot of repeatable activities that ClickUp AI is able to each time help
me build out those
sub tasks. So, our incredible project manager on our team doesn't have to go in
and create 15
sub tasks every single time we have a project. That's really cool. Yeah,
exactly. It takes a lot
of the the initial thought out of it and gives you just some good ideas for
what those different
steps could be. And like I said, it takes the context from other tasks that
live in the same
location. So, if you have similar work that's already been created, instead of
having to potentially
duplicate that, it will basically understand, okay, we know you've done this
type of work before.
These are the types of tasks that we've seen that you've been doing as a part
of these projects.
Amazing. So, it's just learning over time as you do more repeatable projects,
what is most likely to be that sub tasking, giving you those recommendations.
Exactly.
But ClickUp AI can also be used to instantly generate written content. So, not
just things
like creating tasks, but anywhere in ClickUp that allows for text, you can use
the content AI
portion. So, for example, say you need a jumping off point for writing a
description of this given
task, this right with AI function provides you with a prompt to basically say,
hey, write me a
description or the budget reviewed. You can even include things like tone of
voice, so make it
pretty straightforward. We can choose this type of creativity that we want when
I go in and generate.
It's going to pre format and essentially create this description. And there's
even no copy and
pacing needed because I can just directly insert this into the description
field and it automatically
inputs it. But this is really only like the tip of the iceberg, I would say
with what ClickUp's
content AI can do. And to illustrate what else you can do with this, I actually
going to attach
a doc to this particular task. ClickUp docs are a built in collaborative
documentation tool used
for creating things like internal wikis and knowledge bases, as well as work
specific documentation.
And what's great about ClickUp docs is that you don't have to switch between
different tools
to access this long for written content and it's directly connected to the work
management.
So given that it's meant for long for writing, you can imagine that it's
especially good bit for
content AI. So if you ever use something like chat GPT, you probably have
realized that
getting a real productivity boost from generative AI is highly dependent on
what you ask it.
And given the fact that this is such new technology, most people just don't
know the
right questions to ask it to get the best output. So what's me?
Yeah, absolutely. I'm still learning and I feel like on LinkedIn, I see all of
these
different posts of really cool ways to use chat GPT. I'm like, oh my god, that
's actually a really
great idea. So really what we've done is we've taken the guesswork out of this
process
by partnering with experts across several different business roles and
functions
to fine tune more than a hundred specific prompts that ensure that you're
getting the
highest quality output possible. So really, all you need to do is select your
different role or use
case and it'll give you a prompt to fill in specific variables and then ClickUp
AI just does the
rest for you. So for example, let's say that we'll do the project use case and
we want to,
and as you can see, there's a bunch of different prompts here, but let's say we
want to create
like a project timeline to kind of brainstorm as to what this project could
potentially look like.
So we go in here, it's going to ask me for the name of the project. So we'll
just say it's a
software implementation. I see for the date ranges, say, arc to work first to
December 31st,
2023. And again, you get that same thing where we can view kind of like the
tone of voice,
we'll make it higher creativity. And now it's auto importing this timeline
where it's actually
broken it down into specific tables, right, building out this specific timeline
. And very
similar to that description field, I can actually go ahead and directly insert
this into the dock
itself. And from here, because this dock is connected directly to the work, I
can collaborate
specifically on this document to say, okay, let's highlight this text. I'm
gonna go ahead and comment
and I'm gonna at mention the project manager, Amy and say, Hey, can you review
this timeline?
So I'm communicating directly with Amy. And then from here, once she gives the
go ahead that says,
okay, this timeline actually looks really good. I can now directly highlight
this text and create
tasks out of it. So I can add this task to the project, assigning out to
specific people,
add start and duties that it suggested, and go ahead and actually create the
work directly in the
dock itself. This is really cool. I'm like, I don't ever want to write a
created brief again.
I don't need to. I feel like click on just do it for me. Exactly. Very, very
common for
marketing use cases like creating creative briefs, writing blog posts, even
brainstorming like things
like blog titles. So again, tons of different prompts for all the different use
cases that you
might see across things like marketing, project management, product and
engineering. You name it.
That's awesome. And also, once you've actually created and established this
document,
you can do things like summarizing the content. So giving you that like kind of
instant sneak
peek as to what's included in this doc. And you can insert it as a summary
block at the very top
of the document. And you can even use click up AI to further refine text that's
already in the
doc. So if I highlight text, you have the ability to fix spelling and grammar,
make it longer,
make it shorter, even translate it into different languages, explain things,
continue writing.
So it really helps you just improve your your current writing as well to make
it a little bit
better. I have never needed anything more because I tend to be the most verbose
writer on our team. And when I saw that prompt of make it shorter, I need I
need this. I mean,
it's definitely been there before. So yeah, so basically just to summarize what
I've shown so far,
click up AI really just it currently includes the project management AI. So
this is where we aim
to provide important updates in insights faster and also allow for quicker
project planning and
automatic subtask generation. It also includes content AI, which helps content
creators write
faster better and even think bigger. So yeah, that concludes my presentation.
Mike, that was incredible. As made evident by how many times I smiled lit up
and then ask questions
about it. What are the cool things about this show is a lot of times I'm seeing
products for the
first time as our viewers are. So thank you so much for going through that demo
. That is really
awesome. And my brain is already thinking of all the ways that this could save
our marketing team
and project manager. So much time on tasks that we spend a ton of time on every
single day. So
thank you so much. With that, we're going to wrap up the show with what I like
to call our lightning
round Q&A. So Mike, I have a couple questions for you if you're ready.
Absolutely. Let's go for it.
Okay, so the first one is how long has click up been building AI into your
product? How long
have you been thinking about it and building it in? Yeah, so I would say that
AI has always been a
part of click up in a more behind the scenes capacity. However, I would say
that we started
rolling out click up AI as a product back in April. That's awesome. I do think
that's a common
thing we're hearing is like, it's always kind of been there. It's just been in
recent as generative
AI and Chachi BT as these things have kind of blown up where people are looking
for it more. So
it's great to hear that it's always kind of been there. So you guys have been
doing this for a long
time. This isn't new. Now it's just how you're bringing it to market and
expanding on it.
Exactly. Just to keep up with trends.
Awesome. And so with that being said, what is generally available to the public
right now is
what you just showed up in that demo. Is that generally available for customers
right now?
Yep. So everything that I just showed is generally available.
Awesome. And then also, what's next on your guys's roadmap? Is there anything
you can share as far as
how his click up is thinking about AI moving forward? And I know you're sure a
little bit
to begin. I'd love to dig into that. Yeah, absolutely. So I'd say our main
focus right now is making
more of our project management capabilities more robust. So what that will
include, and I have a
couple features that are up and coming. So things like that AI summary that is
shown for threads and
tasks, that's actually going to be available as a custom field. So instead of
just going to be a
regular text update for copy and pasting, it will be a text custom field that
can be viewed as a
column within that initial list. Also, there will be AI generated standups. So
for example,
managers will soon have the ability to generate those updates, similar to what
I show in tasks,
but for individual people and teams. So what this means is that with the click
of a button,
you can get a summary of what each person on your team has done in the last 24
hours,
three, seven or seven days or even the last month. It's also going to be
available on lists so that
you can generate that same kind of summary or multiple tasks or multiple
projects.
That's really cool. It's like a manager's best friend. Exactly. Yeah. So you
don't have to have
those. Honestly, like it can either replace meetings or just make meetings much
, much more
efficient. Yeah, what's cool about that is I think about as a manager, what's
time consuming,
or as an individual contributor that reports to a manager is I come to my one
on ones, I'm like,
Oh, I've got to like, what did I do? Like at a fast moving company, do I
remember all the things
that I did? So having something that can generate that for me just saves me
time prepping for a one
on one or meeting. And then we can focus on things that are really important to
me, like growth and
company, like it saves so much time of digging into that like really kind of, I
don't know, boring,
takes a lot of time. So that's, that's awesome. Absolutely. And if you asked my
manager, he always
has to give me like a virtual slap on the wrist because I always forget to like
give a text update
of basically what I've done for our one on one meetings. So it will definitely
help with my
relationship with my manager. I'll have this. This is the feature I'm looking
forward to.
Yeah, me personally. But yeah. And lastly, also using AI to write and reply to
emails.
So click up natively integrates with your email provider so that you can send
and receive emails
directly from a task and click up. And with click up AI, it will give you
intelligent suggestions for
writing emails as well as providing suggestions to responses. So I know email
is a huge part of
a lot of people's day to day. So that will definitely provide some efficiency
gains there.
Awesome. And then my last question of the lightning round Q and A is, are there
any products that you
in the click up team are currently using that also as AI in it that you found
really beneficial for
your go to market? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I personally record a lot of loom
videos for
creating customer facing demos for specific use cases and integrations. And I
really like how
they've built AI into their platform to break up the video into sections
automatically and even
just give like a full summary in recap of what the video includes. So I thought
that's really cool.
Our sales team uses chorus to record all of our customer calls. And they've
implemented AI to
automatically create meeting summaries in text as well as suggest action items,
which is really
great for referring back to those videos and not having to watch it again on 2x
speed, but
rather just getting those insights in text automatically. And lastly, I think
our engineering team
uses GitHub co-pilot for assistance with coding. And I know that that's been
people that something
that people have been raving about. But I'd say those are probably the three
tools that have really
impressed me with their with their AI. Awesome. And three incredible tools. I
know loom is huge,
chorus is huge. So that absolutely makes sense. Well, Mike, thank you so much
for joining us.
I'm go to market AI today. This was a great demo. I really appreciate you
taking the time. And
hopefully, if anyone, if you're interested in learning more, obviously go to
click up to website,
check them out. And thank you so much for joining us.
Of course, thank you, sir. I appreciate it.