An AI marketing assistant for a marine industry business: 191 social posts drafted and scheduled in four weeks.

The office works from precedent: last year's event post, the previous campaign, a story someone forwards, reset in the planner layout and email formats the team already reads. An event can call for a long sequence of posts across several brands and channels, each needing its copy, its tile and its time. The knowledge of how each brand is presented sat partly in shared documents and partly with the people who do the job. The business wanted that drafting and scheduling carried by an assistant, with the team keeping the decision on what is published in its brands' names, and with briefing done by email, where the team already works. That is what Southern Sky AI was engaged to build.

The assistant works under its own name and mailbox, so anyone dealing with it knows it is an AI assistant. A brief arrives by email or through the chat on the dashboard, with photos, artwork and documents read as part of it. Within seconds the assistant replies with a job number and its reading of the request, and where a fact is missing, such as a registration link, it asks the team.

Its duties are social posts with their tiles, email campaigns, the monthly newsletter, media releases and calendar updates. Drafting runs on the office's own material: house rules for each brand, standing knowledge the office has recorded, past approved sends, and newsletter items banked through the month. Social tiles are built in the office's design account from its own templates and photographs, and a photo library of about 11,000 images is catalogued so the assistant can search it. The images are the business's own, and the assistant does not generate them.

Each job has one page carrying the draft, the tiles and the schedule, with three choices: approve and schedule, bank for later, or request changes in ordinary words. Approving an email campaign builds it as a draft in the business's email platform. Each revised draft comes back saying what changed and what stayed the same.

Social scheduling runs in bulk. For a planner, the assistant writes the posts in the office's date, topic and content layout, names the owning brand on each, and resolves each brand and platform to one of the 11 connected accounts. For an event it can build a sequence such as one post per attending company per day, starting two weeks out. On approval it books each post in the social planner at its own time, under a planner user of its own so the team can see which posts it made. It can move a post's time or change text across a set of posts afterwards, and a quarter-hourly check confirms when booked posts go live and sends the office one summary.

When someone corrects a draft in a way that could apply to later jobs, the assistant asks whether to keep the correction. A yes becomes a house rule, recorded with the date and who asked, and shown on the dashboard where the office can read or remove it. Around the jobs, a Monday look-ahead email shows the marketing manager what is coming up and what has not started, and a half-hourly check looks for stalled jobs and faults and raises them for a person.

In its first four weeks the assistant put 191 social posts into the business's social planner across 11 channels and four brands: 150 published, and 41 booked up to two and a half weeks ahead.

In under three weeks the office sent it 49 jobs: 30 social jobs, 7 email campaigns, 9 newsletter items and 3 calendar updates. Across its first 24 jobs none failed, and the median time to a first draft was under fifteen minutes, against a promise of the same business day. The team also uses the chat to ask where a job is up to, with 27 questions answered in a single week.

The team's time goes on briefing and deciding, and a planner of posts goes out on schedule from one approval.

Two principles governed this build. An assistant that writes in a business's name runs to a review standard set before its first draft: a person approves each draft before a post is booked or a campaign is built, briefs are accepted from the office's approved addresses only, and instructions written inside an email are read as material for the draft, so a message asking it to skip approval still produces a draft for review. And its running cost and records are managed as a business system: cost is measured each week against a spending ceiling set in advance, test jobs go to a test address only, and the business's jobs sit in a database of their own with weekly backups.