Raise your hands if you ever had to create the kickoff deck And most of us either do it from scratch, or they might have a templated Google Slides deck or something from Pitch or something like that from Canva. And then the kind of hunt context and spending at least 30 minutes and building the deck. That's what most people do, maybe some even more than 30 minutes, equals to one hour.

Welcome back to ClickUp Weekly episode number 25. This is Gray and Alex this week, jumping in from the ZenPilot team. We are the unofficial show for all things ClickUp. So we're going to be covering what's new in ClickUp, and we're really going to be digging into ClickUp AI. We're going to be talking about skills and artifacts today. Alex has an awesome demo that he's going to take us through as we jump in and we look at how to get the most out of ClickUp AI. Artifacts are super cool, and ClickUp added them very quickly. Skills have been around for longer, but we're gonna show you how to use both of those and we'll explain exactly what they are here as we dive into ClickUp Weekly. So Alex, if you were ready, let's dive in. We'll talk about what's new in ClickUp. As our very first thing.

We've got custom fields on lists. And you and I went back and forth on this last week a little bit. Don't you just explain for everybody like what does custom fields on lists mean? What do we do with these properties? And we'll we'll talk about what's good and and what's not good yet in the in the tool. Sure thing the the visit the vision on these is great. It's been missing for a long time. People have been asking for it, and this is a great first step in that direction. As most people know, custom fields in ClickUp historically have always been tied to a specific task. Pretty much anything in the workspace had to be on a task to have any value in reporting and seeing the data. So this is ClickUp's attempt to take that beyond just having tasks hold information and roll it up to like a list to see global things over there, and actually have properties such as estimates, whatnot, the signees, dates, and now custom fields on the list itself as a first step. So you can run proper filio cards to understand I want to look at them projects or lists, see their revenue information about them, services set on them that I don't want to roll up from the death need to see that. So great idea, great vision. We can even talk a bit about where it's full ensured currently. But that is the summary on the Yeah, I think the the alternative in the meantime for anybody who is tried this or just thought about the need is that you just need to add a custom field to all the tasks within a specific list and then give them all the same property. So I've got a client and for fresh market, or maybe across my clients, there's a series of clients who are managed by the same account manager. And I want to quickly be able to see a view at my clients level, the space level here. I want to be able to see a view for you know all the tasks that are assigned to Alex as the account manager. Simple example. So In the interim, we just need to add a custom field for account manager and set everything. And we could do this via automation. So it's not a huge huge deal. But everything for Dunder Mifflin and Trap and Save all get the account manager Alex custom field property automatically filled in. Now we can filter by that on the clients page. And as we add new clients that Alex manages, we don't have to keep adjusting locations or one of the other hacks that we used to do in the system. We can go get it. So it's not a terrible workaround, but this definitely simplifies it. Alex, what are the other like what are the downsides of doing it the old way? Of that? And then let's talk through, you know, what are the downsides of the current implementation of it? And Yeah, sure thing. I say the downsides are minimal, and it's exactly what you said, Ray, with you need to just be proactive set automations up at the list level to say that everywhere. But I think and this is me basically going the downsides of the new way, because even with that, I think we'll still need to do both, basically, in some situations. And why am I saying that? If you're having something as a list custom field, and that sort of information, you want that to be visible on the task itself. You might imagine, oh, I can see that it inherits these custom fields from the list level. No that's not true. You can't see any of it in the task. So let's you only have your client on the list custom field, it's not showing up in the task view or in a list view, as you're looking at tasks for multiple clients, which is a bit of a problem. Yeah, I think you definitely need to be able to visualize that and and see it. Which Sounds, you know, to my uneducated ears. Like it sounds like not that big of a a change to make to enable that ability in the system. So this is in beta right now. I'm sure we'll see a bunch of improvements. That is one of the most obvious ones that sticks out to me. Anything else stick out to you on this one? Yes, probably one of the most common use cases that people will look for with the list level custom fields is to calculate things such as cost for this project by taking a roll up a full time tract, multiply that by like or rate or by cost, whatever, and have it not on every task, but at the project level. Only problem is you need the formula to do that, and formulas are currently not supported as list custom fields. So we don't know if they're gonna end up there by the time it goes like global audience GA. But right now, formulas can be used in portfolio cards or to create list level custom fields. So that is a bit problematic as well. Yeah, that makes sense.

Well, I've got two other quality of life improvements in ClickUp that are new that I wanted to call out. These ones are, you know, to some people, these are gonna seem super small, but if this is a need that you have, these are gonna matter for sure. The first one is quote replies in chat. So there are times where you know, we are in a thread talking through some item and you asked the question, someone else answered it. Four people later have mentioned, but someone wants to chime back in and reply to your specific original question. Maybe the answer wasn't good enough. The ability to quote that reply in chat is a really small quality of life improvement, but it really helps to be able to say this is the specific message I'm replying to. And readers on the other side don't have to try to follow the whole thread of all the logic of the thread so far to figure out wait, what are you saying that in response to? So that's a really simple one, and I can show what that looks like here in ClickUp. If we go in, let's find a channel. Let's go to well, here's an example. Write a sample email for Ash in a thread. You'll now see the option to quote that reply and it'll pull this up. So this is probably more you know clickable. Applicable if we write a couple dummy messages in here. So you can get the idea of hey, there's a whole thread going. Someone hits I want to reply to this specific one. You know, great thread. And sent now you can see what were they responding to, and it'll take you back up and highlight the specific message. Seems like a simple one, but this is really helpful, especially if your team has the good habit of using threads for extended conversations based around a specific topic. And I think threads, like for most teams, you want to wind up with fewer channels and more threads rather than than the inverse, which is very few threads and a thousand channels. Is there anything I'm missing on this one, though, that you'd want to call out? No, I think that's a great summary, and probably Slack users that' are already familiar with this Llack experience as they're moving to ClickUp chat are going to be very thankful for oh now I can actually have this be more helpful in what the heck am I even responding to currently and make it a bit more clear. So that's awesome. Yeah, it's such a good reminder of just how much Slack has built over the years. Like that is a really good tool ClickUp chat has really come a long way toward that. I would imagine over the next six months as we're recording these, like we'll have another. Six plus updates like this that are kind of like oh here's a small feature we never really thought about it but now that it's there like it's actually super helpful.

Okay, this was a super frustrating experience for me. Start writing something. Someone who's easily distracted. You start typing something to AI in Clikup, and you're asking something and you're distracting, you go somewhere else. You lose the window, you go back, and AI the chat feature in ClickUp didn't save the draft message that you had sent it, especially if you were working on a thread and you realize oh I need some context to point it to go somewhere else and ClickUp to grab it, it's gone by the time you're there. Well now ask AI and ClickUp saves your drafts for you. Alex was this pain point for you or no? I didn't bump into it a lot, but I do remember, hey, here is a whole lot of context links from a bunch of other tabs, and oh, where's that thing that's in the docs somewhere else? Click and then I'm back and And is gone. So yeah, it happened to me too. Yeah. As always if you open up you know brain in ClickUp and you're starting a new chat, you'll be able to see your past conversations from the top left of the chat window. If you hit the new chat drop down, you'll see other items there. And we will link up in the show notes here this link to the canny the feedback board that has kind of an overview where other people had the same challenges and updates in terms of what what this looks like. So shout out to James and the team at ClickUp for the improvement there. Again, kind of a minor one, but big quality life for anybody who is using that mask AI feature in the system.

All right, now it's enough preamble. Let's get to it. I want to talk about skills and artifacts. And maybe I'll set the stage. You've got a super cool demo that I'm really excited to look at. So we got skills in ClickUp with your your playbooks. Hey, how does this work? You know, like we've got the instructions, the context, you can have sub skills that it references, or other tools that it's pulling from, and it's safe. So that every time you want to run that skill, it's got the same core set of instructions. So you're getting more consistent high quality outcomes. And then artifacts, we can explain more, maybe when we get there, but these are the outcomes not always of a skill, but certainly we can use skill to generate artifacts. And an artifact, could be you know a deck, a dashboard, could be page, a mini app. And these have a ton of cool features. These have different versions. You can update an artifact. You don't have to start from scratch every single time and regenerate. This is like the early pain point in image generation with AI tools. Every time you need a little edit, it would rebuild the whole entire thing, and then you got rid of the sixth finger, but you gained a seventh toe and it's like, wait a second, this is not what I want. You can comment on artifacts, which is super cool. You can share them. We use superagents to build and update them. So I want to walk through both of those, but I want to do it with with like a live demo of it. So Alex, if you don't mind, would you take over the screen? And can you just walk us through set the stage for what this skill is doing? And then take us kind of in depth through the skill and through the artifact that gets produced on the other end of it.

Yeah, sure thing. So this example here is gonna help us build kickoff deck. In this case, we have used our call process for the blueprint that we're working with our clients, and what we're covering in it. We don't have to manually go and use the template, change things, variables, and then manually create it. We get the skill that has the playbook on how that's meant to be done. And that we are telling it how we want it to look. We can attach brand guidelines, butnot. And there is also this thing called subskills or related skill. You might see that over there on my screen. And we can chat about it too, because what the heck is the deal with subskills or related skills? There is such a thing as too much going on in just one skill. So depending on what you're looking at there, you might want to make it a bit more granular. But that's gonna whole goal with this, have a playbook on how we want this kickoff deck to get created, and then The output of that will be an artifact that we can share, edit, and use later on with our clients. The way this starts is very simple. It's always with SKI, and then just tell it like, hey, I want to create a scale, and it's just gonna ask you, like, tell me about this skill, how it works. The more specific you are, the better, with resources, examples, but you can start with natural language and it'll get you pretty good results. At the end of it, it'll look quite like this, can be a decently long document. But see, this one will tell it like, hey, here is what you should have, exactly 10 slides, what you can what you have in it, what sort of sections to cover, do it as an artifact. The scale does contain other information such as Say for the graphics on this, or how it looks like the style, use the branding skill, which explains like the the call the hex goes that we're need to use and the font styles and whatnot. So it uses a consistent theme and how these architects look like. And there's some additional other skills on other things going on with booking calls, which is a part of it. It's pretty cool. I think that context is super, and this is just the best practice for anybody making skills and you covered it there. Was like give it as much context as possible. If you train it to work in a specific location, too. Like, hey, I want you to work on this list, or I want you to work on this project specifically or this type of task. That's really helpful for it. And then certainly the more like skills that have are well trained on context from your workspace specifically and told what to look for. Are gonna perform way better than just kind of a generic prompt of you know building a kickoff deck every time you're gonna get a much wider range of outcomes when you give it a lot less detail and when you when quality matters and you care about how is this going to you know be phrased how's it gonna be designed like you have here or booking times, do these actually match what we want? Like training it on all that context matters a ton. So I think it's a good call. Context is king, indeed. And besides providing you with that as part of the skill, we're telling Brain to look at some related tools via the MCP, such as Google Calendar, such as our email, such as our CRM, such as handoff that's also created by AI, in this case summarizing calls, look at call recordings from the previous conversation with the client, and all of that ends up as context for this skill and for the artifact that we're gonna get into. So really the tricky part is build a skill. Once the skill is done, actually getting the artifact in place is the quickest part. From all of it. You really just want to go. And I am not gonna create from scratch. Sometimes this can take quite a few good minutes. Nobody wants to direct my screen loading for five minutes until it generates. But it's as simple as once you have it ready, just say skill for whatever client you want to. And that's enough to get it started. It did take 10 minutes, as you can see, between when I've promised it and when it has actually pushed it out. So I'm saving you guys 10 minutes by not having to go through that. But the output is this thing that I'm gonna get into just now. That is our V1 for how this is meant to work, and I guess it's I'm gonna collapse so we can see the better. It captures the client, keeps the team on what we need to capture there, take information from the sales handoff, the people involved in the process, all the design and whatnot, what we heard from them in their intake form they have submitted, all content that they've gathered from that C from our sales calls from February six. Got it from that, which is pretty awesome. And standard things, whatnot, how it works, which this could easily have taken quite a bit of time to get it right and how it works. And bonus points, super awesome. That can make scheduling also pretty easy. Because this does look at my calendar for we usually have some said calls that we're setting during kick off. So this without having me to go and let me open my calendar when I can do this call. I just go here and tell them like hey, let's look at when we can meet. And this tells me my actual time for the calls. It keeps a cadence so we can have in chronologically. Again, because of a sub skill that lets us know that. And in it we can see when we're gonna have our meeting cadence, when we can have like the next one, any buffers based on instructions, because we do need some time between call two and call three to actually build the stuff, you know? And if it's blocked, we can send calendar invites and we can get to work. So that's kind of the end result. Of spending, I want to say this didn't this took a long time to get it. It was hard work. It does did for expertise for sure, but it didn't take me more than 30 to 50 minutes to get the most important parts of it in place. And this was the V1 with no edits made. If I want to change anything at all that I'm not happy with, that's what Grace said with versioning comments. See, this is V1. I didn't edit this. So this wasn't this wasn't altered for this video's purposes. It's super raw, as ClickUp gave it to us, but now we can go and do edits on these artifacts. And you know what artifacts? There's two types of edits. You can either kind of select edit in line. Let's say I don't want to name this client journey, I want to name this partner for some reason. I just want to make some specific text edits. And they will get saved. Like that's one way. The other one is to kind of select an item. Like, hey, I want to change. This element here. I want to make this card from here make this card's background red So just again, tell us talk to it and add your language, queue up your edits until we're happy. When you're done, apply the edits, it will tell you something, it'll show you this thing that's not super dutiful to look at, but it does contain the raw data behind it and see. Real time, the edits are getting applied. Brain process them. Usually they don't take that long. I don't expect this to take longer than thirty seconds, something like that,

Yeah. This is like I think people will be really used to artifacts from well some people watching us are super used to artifacts from Claude or Chat TPT or another tool. But very few tools have this type of visual editing of hey, I wanna update Yeah, this specific slide. Normally what you need to do is you need to either type it or dictate in hey, on slide four, please make this update on slide five, please make that update, leave everything else alone. This is really nice just to be able to click, especially for users who are newer to artifacts, just be able to click hey, I want this section to now be red instead of you know whatever color like to make those edits. So I think this is something that is very different. I mean, it's super cool that all this is built into ClickUp, you can use different models. You've got so many things that you can take advantage of, but a lot of it is pretty similar to what you can do in Claud or another tool. This is actually a differentiated where it's better than what those other tools have. And I would assume that those tools will absorb some of this like you know these ideas into them at some point. But certainly for the time being, I think that's pretty awesome that that it has that ability. I've got a thousand other thoughts, Alex, but I'll let you pull this up if you want to and take us through kind of like anything else that you have in this specific deck or let me know and I'll I'll keep pushing. So it's nothing much as you want to make edits, and that's a great point of this. And you probably don't want me saying this great, but actually you know we had that conversation on should is being claw, should it be in ClickUp. And this element here for collaboration, this editing, having other team members jump in with your own thoughts so we can get it there edited easier. That's made some things happen, let's use artifacts, even though Claude might have more horsepower under the hood, but this experience can be worth it for some use cases. So that can be super valuable if you're not super tech savvy and only have an easy time to make edits and collaborate with your team specifically, which is super awesome.

Yeah, we had sweeter company offsite, we were in Toronto here a month ago and running through hey, is we're taking we're rebuilding how we do the blueprint. And if you're curious in what the blueprint is and how we work with teams, to centralize like to build them a central source of truth in ClickUp you can go to ZenPilot.com slash blue blueprint and you can see the details of what it looks like. Well as we continue to work through hey what's the next iteration how can we make this better how can we make this even more engaging for teams to look at and easier for them to interpret and we're looking at well how can we just build an outcome we don't want it like a whiteboard is great but a whiteboard only goes so far and have landed on yeah well we need to build this full artifact there's one side of our brain or heart or both that is always like well we need to do everything we possibly can in ClickUp because we need to be on top of how everything works like this is part of why we're doing ClickUp weekly it's like we are seeing more ClickUp workspaces every week throughout the week than anybody else and we got to not get calloused to that we need to take hey what can we learn from each of these experiences so that we can continue to get better and better There's the other side, which is like, yeah, but nobody is paying us to be the clikup cheerleaders who are just all in whatever ClickUp does, like they can do no wrong. So we need to have the objective side of this that is, hey, what's the best tool for the job? That's why we landed on ClickUp in the first place. Is it always the best tool for the job? Absolutely not. For the average like for most teams, most of the time, who we're specifically focused on servicing, is it the best tool? Yes, it is. That's not every time, obviously, but most of the time it is. And so we're going back and forth on, hey, should we just build this through Claude or through Codex or you know, through some other tool? Or do we build this in ClickUp and going back and forth? There's pros and cons to both, and wound up building this in ClickUp. Go, but I've just been so impressed. I thought in my head at that time, I thought there's no way that we're gonna wind up you know long term doing this on top of ClickUp. And I've been really, really impressed by how these things have come together.

Okay, a couple quick things. To run it. I think Alex shared it. You can kind of see it there you can run it. You've got the drop down in or the as you're chatting with ClickUp specifically you can grab skills from here but you just use the slash command and get used to just using the slash command I will always encourage you to be as efficient as possible doing it you can share skills with your team there is one thing to watch out for currently with sharing skills if you make a skill public everyone else on the team has the ability to edit it and so there is some risk people just need to be educated well around how do skills work and if I Tweak the whole skill for something that I want changed on this one specific presentation. I've now modified it and potentially ruined it for everybody else. So just understand the difference between where am I just editing an artifact for myself and where am I changing the whole skill. That is not a very confusing thing if you've been trained on it, but if you're new to the system, it's possible you can mix those things up. So just be aware of that. That can be a gotcha for teams. And if you need help training your team to get the most out of ClickUp, you should book a call with us. ZenPilot.com slash call. Artifacts. Maybe next week or in a upcoming one, Alex, you and I can run through how to use art kits to be able to reuse a layout and generate stuff consistently. With artifacts, the other thing I wanted to call out is you can actually use superagents to build and update artifacts as you go. Do you want to walk through why that's helpful?

Yeah, sure thing. As we're talking about a better dashboarding experience specifically, let's say ClickUp's native dashboard scans. Deliver something, can show something where it can calculate some metric that you want to based on existing data. You can totally use an artifact to create whatever report you want to, or webpage, whatever you want to call it, mini app. But the problem might be you want that to be updated constantly. Maybe you don't want it with today's data, you want that to always be with the current data based on new activities, new status changes, more time getting at in the system, things like that. And a current limitation is that artifacts don't auto update themselves if they're pulling from the workspace data information, which is gonna change. I have some insider knowledge that told me, hey, that's actually gonna happen soon enough. But until that happens, super agents are what you want to use to get that data updated, because it can definitely trigger the super agent to build artifact from scratch, for sure, but also trigger it to update it with the recent data, and yes, that will use some additional craters to get it done. But agents are the way for you to update something that's meant to be. Evergreen and it's always up to date and not stale with data for sure.

There. I don't know if people realize how cool it is, Alex, that without seeing the underlying data of call recordings and anything else. I don't know that you would necessarily feel by watching this feel the impact of like, look, it already personalized the whole deck in terms of here were your goals, here's the people who need to be involved. But I think everybody can relate to hey, we've got a process that we take people through in the blueprint process. And because of who needs to touch it and the thought and effort that needs to go into designing your workspace, there always needs to be this gap between we take people through the same series of calls every time. Here's the meetings, here's the information we need to get out, here's the conversations that we need to have, and what we need how we dig into the heart of the issue to ultimately design a great system because it is so easy to say, here's my business, take all the context you know about me. You know wireframe me what ClickUp what a good ClickUp workspace should look like for my organization and Claude all the all the tools will tell you oh yeah here's exactly what it should look like and it's a disaster there's this like confidence does not matter without competence. So you need to have somebody who really understands what are the implications of all this how does this how's this gonna work together. And to do that takes some time. Well it's super cool and everyone watching this has a process that they follow in a similar service or you know, engagement type that that they they have working with their clients or their internal teams or vendors or stakeholders. And you can relate to that. So it's so cool that it can pull from the calendar, say, here's the times. And then as we lock in, Alex, does Monday at 3 p.m. Work for you? No, that doesn't work. Okay, 430. That then doesn't work either. Let's go to Tuesday at 11. Okay. Well now we did Tuesday. Well now because we didn't pick Monday, the next call has to fall on this day. And options are already there. It's just like look at this, here's our times. Go schedule it. It really makes scheduling a lot simple simpler and and a lot more fun to go through that process as well. So that's one everyone can probably relate to right away. And it's an application of skills and artifacts that you ought to use very very quickly. And if you need any help doing that, reach out to us and we'd be happy to walk through what that looks like the best way to build it and how to get the most out of ClickUp at your organization.

All right, Alex this was great. I appreciate you coming on, being willing to share that. As we're signing off here from ClickUp Weekly, want to remind everybody, subscribe to the show here on YouTube, leave a comment, send in any questions that you've got. We want you to be a part of this. Is not hey, ZenPilot just loves talking all the time. Like we want this to be a community built for people who are passionate about delivering great work and doing that with efficiency in the process. If you're interested in coming on the show as a guest, you can use the guest application through the website. We'll link that up here as well. And as always, subscribe to first class operations at zenpilot.com/newsletter. Thanks for joining us here on episode 25 of ClickUp Weekly. We'll see you all next week.