For the past few years, using AI at work has largely meant opening a chat window. Tools such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini have become useful for research, analysis, ideation and drafting, helping us interrogate documents, explore problems and get from a blank page to something worth working with faster.
AI is now moving beyond these general-purpose models. A new generation of specialised tools is emerging, designed around particular tasks and increasingly capable of doing things that previously required specialist skills or considerable amounts of time.
At Paper + Spark, we have been exploring where these tools fit into our own workflow. Most marketing projects follow a familiar journey, beginning with the brief and research before moving through creative development and prototyping to presentation and delivery. Here are six tools we think are worth knowing about.
Capturing the brief: Granola
Most projects begin with conversations: the initial brief, discovery sessions, stakeholder interviews and workshops that help define the challenge. Anyone who has led one knows the difficulty of being fully engaged while also capturing everything that matters.
Granola records and transcribes conversations without adding another bot to the call, combining the transcript with your own notes to create structured notes, decisions and actions.
For us, its value extends beyond the individual meeting. Multiple conversations can become an evidence base that can be interrogated collectively. If we conduct a series of stakeholder or customer interviews, we can explore recurring themes and differences across them without manually reviewing every transcript. It means more of the knowledge generated in those conversations can feed into what happens next.
Research and insights: Gemini Notebook
Once we have defined the challenge, we need to understand it properly. Depending on the project, that can mean working through client research, previous campaigns, reports, spreadsheets, websites and internal documents before bringing in additional external research.
Gemini Notebook, previously known as NotebookLM, brings those sources together so they can be questioned collectively. Its answers remain grounded in the material provided and can be traced back to the underlying sources. For an agency like ours that works extensively in complex and regulated categories, knowing where evidence has come from is essential.
It can also identify patterns, explore apparent contradictions and find areas that warrant further investigation. This speeds up the process of getting across a large body of information, leaving more time to work out what it actually means for the strategy.
Visualising ideas: Canva
Once we understand the problem, audience and opportunity, we need to turn that thinking into ideas people can respond to. Canva’s growing suite of AI tools can generate and edit images, graphics and video, helping teams move quickly from an idea in their heads to something others can see and react to. And as a home-grown Australian technology success story, we’re particularly happy to see it pushing into this space.
For us, pitch mood films and storyboards are good examples of the opportunity. We can generate visual concepts, explore different creative directions and introduce movement to help demonstrate the atmosphere and visual language of an idea while it is still being developed.
It is not going to replace the craft involved in producing the finished campaign. But it can help us explore ideas faster and give clients something tangible to respond to before significant creative and production resources are committed.
Digital prototyping: Lovable
Some ideas need to be experienced rather than explained. Paper + Spark’s work increasingly extends into digital experiences, from calculators and decision-support tools to campaign platforms. Historically, demonstrating an idea like that in a pitch might involve static mock-ups and several slides explaining how it would work.
Lovable allows people without traditional development skills to build functioning digital experiences conversationally. That creates the possibility of showing a client a prototype they can actually use.
Experienced developers remain important when creating robust digital products, but prototyping earlier allows an idea to be tested and refined before significant development resource is committed.
The pitch presentation: Gamma
Once the strategy and creative response have taken shape, we need to communicate them clearly. Like most agencies and marketing teams, we spend a lot of time turning substantial bodies of thinking into presentations that people can quickly understand, from senior leadership teams to employee change management forums.
Gamma uses AI to create and restructure presentations and documents. Existing material can be reorganised into a visual narrative that provides a first structure to refine.
For us, the appeal is not asking AI to make the argument. It is shortening the journey from thinking to communication. Getting to a strong first structure faster leaves more time to concentrate on the story, what really deserves attention and how best to make the case.
Managing the delivery: Manus
Once the work is approved, attention shifts to delivery. This is where we are starting to explore agentic AI: tools that can carry out multi-stage tasks, interact with other systems and continue working without requiring a new prompt at every stage.
Manus can connect with workplace tools, retain project context and undertake scheduled or recurring tasks. On a marketing project, that could include reviewing project information, identifying overdue actions and upcoming deadlines and compiling regular status reports.
Good project management still relies on judgement and relationships. But if AI can reduce some of the administration surrounding it, project teams can spend more time resolving issues and keeping the people involved aligned.
What this means for marketers
Aligning these tools to our own workflow has helped us think differently about where AI is heading. On a single project, it can already play a role in capturing the brief, interrogating research, visualising the creative response, prototyping an experience, developing the presentation and supporting delivery.
That does not mean every marketing team needs these six tools. They are at different stages of maturity and will continue to change quickly. A more useful exercise is to look at how your own team works. Where does information get lost? Which processes consume disproportionate amounts of time? Where does a lack of specialist resource prevent a good idea from being explored?
That is how we are approaching AI at Paper + Spark. We are looking for places where it can remove friction from the way we work or allow us to do something that previously would have been impractical. The tools will keep changing. For us, the test is: does it help us do better work for our clients?
The marketer’s AI toolkit at a glance
| Tool | What to use it for | Where to get it |
|---|---|---|
| Granola | Meeting intelligence. Capturing briefs, discovery sessions, interviews and workshops; turning transcripts and notes into structured insights; interrogating multiple conversations for recurring themes. | Get Granola |
| Gemini Notebook | Research and insight. Bringing documents, reports, websites and other sources together; questioning them collectively; identifying patterns and contradictions; tracing answers back to source material. | Try Gemini Notebook |
| Canva | Creative visualisation. Rapidly exploring visual directions and creating imagery, storyboards, mood boards, presentations and early video concepts to help make an idea tangible. | Get Canva |
| Lovable | Digital prototyping. Turning an idea into a functioning website or digital experience without traditional development skills; useful for demonstrating campaign platforms, calculators and interactive concepts. | Try Lovable |
| Gamma | Presentations. Turning an outline, existing content or substantial body of thinking into a structured visual presentation that can then be refined into the final story. | Try Gamma |
| Manus | Agentic AI and delivery. Carrying out multi-stage tasks, working across connected tools, retaining project context and supporting recurring work such as project administration and reporting. | Get Manus |
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