The picture was consistent: information overload, poor communication, time lost and messages missed. One department head described receiving hundreds of emails a day and deleting them to cope, with the stress and missed deadlines that follow. The leader of the EAI team wanted to use AI to address it. We got there through semi-structured interviews, analysed thematically: every point on a digital post-it in FigJam, sorted into communication, collaboration and AI, and from there into seven themes.

• Brainstorming, then How might we, to turn problems into opportunities.
• Four personas, for the range of people who would use it.
• A storyboard of an imaginary working day with it.
• A large number of paper wireframes, to decide which features mattered.

BriefBot is an AI assistant that takes routine tasks off the newsroom’s hands and works inside the tools already in use.

• It learns the job. A thorough registration at the start teaches it your role, it keeps learning from how you work, and the home screen can be arranged as you like.
• A calendar that maintains itself. Meetings and deadlines are added automatically, so nothing is lost in the flow.
• Morning reports. A brief every morning with the day’s tasks and deadlines, summarised.
• Slack and mail, handled. Long threads summarised, emails translated and sorted by importance. Choose the applications to include, and it works across them.
• Accessible. Adjustable font sizes, voice commands, a text-to-speech reader, colourblind and dyslexic modes, and light and dark mode, built against WCAG with full compliance as the aim.

• Usability tested in Maze, the remote testing tool: time per task and feedback after each, quantitative and qualitative in one pass.
• The full evaluation is linked at the top.