The outcomes

• One FT headcount gained back - daily project Ops and admin tasks are handled w/o hiring another PM
• One agent, one tool, every project tracked - The firm got rid of all other siloed platforms and integrated project management into one acknowledged space with Sara
• 15+ hours saved per week - and increased output across various teams and projects
• One digital teammate your whole team can work with - one agent handles tasks across executives, designers, and PMs

‍

About Whipsaw

Whipsaw (https://www.whipsaw.com/) is a San Francisco-based product design consultancy that shapes the physical, digital, and brand experiences of both Fortune 500 companies and startups. To extend its team's capacity, Whipsaw brought on the Automat Workforce agent, serving as an AI project manager and operations teammate alongside Walker Harden, Director of Experience Design, and his team. Working across the tools they already use (Google Workspace and Slack, plus Harvest and Airtable), the agent runs day-to-day project operations: saving the team hours every day, making project ops faster and more reliable, and letting Whipsaw scale operations more efficiently. 

‍

The challenge: a lean team carrying manual overhead and always-on client engagement

Whipsaw runs 20 to 30 projects across various stages at any given time. Keeping them on track (parsing kickoff decks, updating Slack, tracking budgets and team hours, triaging email, and coordinating studio logistics) lands on the project managers, project design leads, directors, and leadership.  

The team had deliberately kept its toolset lean. They removed Asana and opted to run everything through Slack. The last thing they wanted was another platform to log into and babysit. They found that they were paying for user seats that never got used. They were an obvious cut to reduce overall team expenses.

Before Sara, everything we currently have her doing was a manual process, either done by myself or taken on by our project managers or even our studio manager in their day-to-day capacity.” 
— Walker Harden, Director of Experience Design

‍

‍

Evaluating buy vs. build

Whipsaw is fluent in AI and has adopted various tools for almost two years: ChatGPT, then Claude and Claude Code by late 2025. Walker had even tried to build his own email-triage tool with Claude Code. It technically worked, but it spun up Google Sheets he had to manage by hand, and it was ultimately faster to keep triaging manually because the Claude attempts ended up being siloed, personal projects. Teammates each rebuilt similar tools their own way, and none of it quite did the job.

I don’t think we’d ever try to build this ourselves.

- Walker Harden

What made Sara different is that she isn’t another tool. She joined the way a person does, with an email address in Whipsaw’s Google admin and her own Slack account, inside the tools the team already used every day.

The way it integrated, the way it was essentially an employee of the team… you can interact with it like any other team member, which makes it a natural process, and it’s inherently shared across the team. It’s just in the tools that we use every day.

‍

The solution: onboarding Sara, a digital coworker that "joins" the team, not acting as another separate tool

Whipsaw piloted Sara with Walker and two project managers, with a clear goal: extend the project managers’ capacity so the studio could take on more clients without hiring another full-time PM.

Onboarding Sara looked like onboarding a new hire. They gave Sara a Google account, added her to projects, and explained the studio in Slack: where new proposals live, how to read the business-development pipeline, and how to turn a kickoff deck into timelines and deliverables mapped into Slack.

‍

Today, Sara handles a bulk of manual tasks across several disciplines and operates existing tools, with human-in-the-loop supervision: 

• Project management: Sends daily project briefings to leadership and project managers (PMs review and confirm before they go out to project threads
• Email triage: Triages email and flags anything important in Slack - tailored to per-user preferences
• Ops admin: Tracks budgets, team hours, and project profitability through Harvest and reports on a weekly basis
• Office management: Handles studio logistics: ordering team lunches, restocking the kitchen, scheduling, and hosting visiting clients (parking, recommendations) from Whipsaw’s own internal docs
• Cross-team collaboration: Works across the whole team: project managers, the UX/UI team, and the industrial designers

Governance is built in. Sara has the same kind of Google permissions as any employee, so there’s no question of unlimited access. Walker is her manager: he sets recurring tasks; Sara also takes instructions from the rest of the team and simply executes them. If a request falls outside her approved scope, she checks in before acting. 

If there are things being requested that are maybe outside her approved set of tasks, she proactively comes to me and says, hey, we’re getting this request. And I can just send a simple Slack message back: yes, go for it, or let’s tune it this way. It's exactly how I would expect a new team member to handle a similar situation.

‍

A proactive agent that goes beyond manual tasks: from "should we hire?" to a ranked shortlist

Walker wanted to forecast the next three months of work to decide whether Whipsaw needed to hire. The data was scattered across decks, folders, Slack, and the BD pipeline, and he wasn’t sure Sara could pull it together. So he sat down with Whipsaw’s VP of Client Relations, jotted rough notes into a quick Google Doc, and pointed Sara at the source material.

She came back with a Google Sheet and a Gantt chart of every ongoing project, the phase each was in, and a projection of what was coming next. The answer was clear.

So Walker handed Sara the next step. Whipsaw had an Airtable of roughly 200 applicants for the open role. He gave her the job description and Airtable access and asked her to rank the candidates. She sorted them into a new column, and Walker set up an automation to reach out to the top ones.

Assigning a project manager to figure that out would easily be a couple-hour process. I said, let’s just see if Sara could do this… and she came back with a Google Sheet, a Gantt chart of all the ongoing projects, the phases they’re in, and a projection of what’s coming up next in about ten minutes.

‍

The impact: hours saved for better focus on leadership work, product design, and client services

Whipsaw is running leaner. The clearest outcome: they extended their existing team’s capacity to service their client load. Walker is candid that the pattern is consistent: 10 to 15 minutes reclaimed several times a day, for him and across the project managers and design leadership.

If you multiply that across the project managers and the other design leadership here at Whipsaw, we’re talking hours of time every day that’s saved because of Sara.

‍

Just as valuable is the peace of mind. Walker no longer combs through every email or worries about missing a client message, because anything important reaches him in Slack, where his attention already is.

Using Sara has allowed me to get away from super repetitive, easily automated tasks… it lets me focus more on what’s meaningful, like designing products and solutions for our clients, mentoring the team, and human connection, versus being stuck in my email inbox or finding documents in Google Drive.

We’ve managed to run our team a little more lean… and generally feel like we’re a company operating in a 2026 environment. This is how work should be and how work should feel.

‍

Earning trust through records, traceability, ownership, and reasoning

Sara now corresponds with Whipsaw’s external vendors and manufacturing partners across the US, Asia, and Europe, keeping projects moving across time zones. Walker’s confidence comes from having shaped the agent himself: giving feedback in Slack on how she writes, and knowing she’s trained on his own past emails, the studio’s client-relations voice, the company handbook, and Whipsaw’s proposals and statements of work.

I’ve had a hand in crafting who she is… She’s trained on our company handbook, all of our capabilities, our deliverables, our proposals and statements of work. She’s very detail-oriented; she doesn’t forget a thing, and she won’t overstep.

‍

How would you recommend for a peer? 

Give it a chance. It might take a few weeks, but you’ll start to see the little ways you use it… If it does a good job, you’ll keep doing it. If it doesn’t, give it candid feedback and help train it to do exactly what you want. The team at Automat has been super receptive to the functionality we’ve asked for. An agent like Sara can be turned on and brought up to speed in a day, trained up in a number of weeks. And if it’s still adding value, that will be very clear. It certainly has for Whipsaw.