David Andrew Wiebe

ClickUp AI – Is it Any Good?

by David Andrew Wiebe | Sep 29, 2023 | Productivity

Is AI quickly making modern business tools – productivity apps, email marketing software, social media automation, and others – irrelevant?

“No,” says businesses from across the internet, “because we’ll integrate our software with AI.”

And this is exactly what’s been happening. Which brings us to the subject of ClickUp AI.

It should be said at the outset that I already have a bias toward ClickUp, given its ability to become just about any productivity tool you need it to be at a moment’s notice – Asana, Notion, Google Calendar, Trello, and more. So, what follows may be little more than gushing for what is already an extraordinary tool. We’ll see…

Either way, here’s my review of ClickUp AI.

What is ClickUp AI?

The ClickUp AI writing assistant was designed to help project managers with mundane, time-consuming tasks, such as generating action items for a specific project.

ClickUp AI can:

Summarize text
Write and edit documents
Generate action items
Role-based tools & templates
Comment & thread summary
Generate subtasks
Task summary
Task progress update
AI search (coming soon)

Ready to try ClickUp? They have a convenient Free Forever plan, as well as several more plans that scale with your business. Just click on the link to get your account set up NOW.

Experiments

So, what is there to do besides play around with ClickUp’s new functionality? I immediately began messing about trying different things to see what I could come up with (and whether I could stump AI). Here is my experience, and the result of my AI experiments.

Experiment #1 – Marketing Plan for My New Year Live Music Event

As my first order of business, I had AI cook up a marketing plan for my new year live music event, slated for January in Victoria, BC.

As expected, ClickUp AI generated a document for me in seconds, just as ChatGPT would.

As anyone who has used ChatGPT or AI writing software will tell you, AI is a great tool for generating ideas you wouldn’t have otherwise come up with.

In this case, I was surprised and/or impressed by the following ideas:

“The event will feature local and international artists, food vendors, and a fireworks display…” My event probably won’t have all those things (mostly because it won’t happen on New Year’s Eve), but it’s always nice to have another perspective on the matter.
“Our primary target audience is music lovers aged 18 – 35 living in or around Victora, BC. Secondary audiences include tourists…” This is mostly true, although I have a feeling, we will have a strong contingent of audiences in their 40s as well. The secondary audience part is spot on.
Marketing Strategies. I doubt we will do everything generated. But it presented me with some great ideas I can use for future events, including advertising, social media, email, influencers, local press, and more.

Experiment #2 – Marketing Task List for My Virtual Assistants

Next, I decided to have AI whip up another new document from scratch. I provided it with talking points (I asked it to generate daily marketing tasks for my virtual assistants), set the tone of voice to “humorous” and creativity to “high,” and let it take over from there.

Within seconds, I had a document that made me smile and laugh. What I did not expect was how the tone of voice affected the specific marketing activities generated. The humor carried over into the tasks themselves!

I don’t think the plan generated would be for us, but no doubt there are companies out there that would love to show off their personality in the manner described in the document.

Just for fun, I also had AI translate the document into Japanese (a language I’m fluent in) and was pleasantly surprised by the results.

There are some cultural references that might fly over a Japanese person’s head, but aside from that, it’s a very on-point translation that’s easy to understand.

Experiment #3 – Drafting a Unique Selling Proposition for My Business

I figured I would try one last experiment before calling it a day. So, just to see if I could stump the AI, I had ClickUp whip up a unique selling proposition for my business.

You don’t often hear the term “unique selling proposition” anymore (many things are personality-, influencer-, or celebrity-driven now), but when comparing products or services, people still like to know what makes one unique versus the other, don’t they?

So, here’s what ClickUp AI came up with based on my prompt:

Well, not only was I unable to stump the AI, but I also didn’t even have to ask for any changes. Again, I’m impressed!

What Else Can ClickUp AI Do?

In my experiments, I mostly had AI generate content or written documents on my behalf, something I knew it would do quite well (but I did not expect it to do as well as it did!).

Besides writing and translating, ClickUp AI can also:

Summarize documents
Explain concepts
Edit/improve writing
Create action items
Simplify your writing
Fix spelling and grammatical issues
Make content shorter or longer

It’s all in the realm of generating, translating, or expanding on the content you or AI generates, which is now a prevalent functionality. But there’s nothing wrong with that!

Summarily, having AI inside one of the most versatile productivity tools out there is a definite benefit!

The Verdict

So, is ClickUp AI any good?

Yes, it’s better than good.

This really sunk in for me with the third experiment, where I asked it to craft a unique selling proposition for my business. I was expecting to have to sit there and offer more guidance and ask for multiple revisions, but I didn’t.

I didn’t have too many preconceptions about ClickUp AI going in, but I was basically thinking to myself, “This is just another company doing trendy things, isn’t it?”

But now having tried ClickUp AI, I asked myself whether I’d want to do without, and the thought made me sad. That’s how you know something it’s worthwhile!

So, kudos go to ClickUp for recognizing that its users might want to take advantage of this new functionality. I think it fits like a glove.

Have you given ClickUp a try yet? If not, and you’re interested in improving your productivity, it’s time you gave it a chance! They have a convenient Free Forever plan as well as Unlimited, Business, and Enterprise plans for those who demand more of their productivity software. Get started now.

Update: September 20, 2023

by David Andrew Wiebe | Sep 20, 2023 | News

I’ve been AWOL now for almost two months, so I thought it was high time I caught you up to speed.

What Happened?

As early as June / July, I knew I needed to take a break / holiday / vacation, whatever you want to call it. A getaway, sure, but more than that, time to lay in bed and do nothing.

I had plans to visit Seattle with friends in mid-August, so I dovetailed that little getaway into a two-and-a-half-week break upon returning to Vancouver.

But I have officially been back at “work” now for a couple of weeks.

In the last six days, I travelled from Vancouver to Calgary, played a gig, got together with family, had some project-related conversations with collaborators and stakeholders, and travelled back to Vancouver. And as you can imagine, I haven’t had time for a heck of a lot more than that in the preceding week.

How I’m Doing

The two and a half weeks on holiday were much needed, but I did not feel fully recharged afterwards.

There could be any number of reasons for that. For the time being, I’m planning to do a cleanse, but if my energy levels remain low, I will see a doctor also.

I’ve also got floaters in my eye from God knows what, but I’m not too worried about that.

Where Things Are At

I haven’t published anything anywhere for about four weeks (aside from tweets or guest posts). Now that’s an oddity for yours truly. Usually, you can’t shut me up!

Partly it has been a matter of pig-headed discipline. I’m more focused on getting Productivity, Performance & Profits Blackbook done than just about anything else, and honestly, I can’t think of a more “Big Domino” project than that at this time.

Another factor is my workload. Admittedly, there haven’t been many changes to it, but writing the equivalent of a quarter of a book per week (15,000+ words) does keep me very occupied. And while I do foresee a transition coming, for now it’s fair to say my plate is close to full.

Even then, you know that I’m not the type to sit around and wait for things to happen. Quietly in the background, I’ve been working on:

Gradually gathering all the clips, I want to share in episode 300 of The New Music Industry Podcast (this has taken far longer than I ever expected it to, even though I knew it was going to be a big project).
Making massive progress with the Productivity, Performance & Profits Blackbook.
Recording podcast episodes as ideas come to me. I’ve captured 45 episodes since May (yet unpublished).
Planning a live event for January and meeting with my team weekly to discuss the project. I’m actively having conversations about this project outside of our weekly meetings too.
Creating and dreaming up a ton of offers for Content Marketing Musician, which I plan to make my primary brand moving forward, though I have a few things left to do with Music Entrepreneur HQ. You heard it here first!
Figuring out how to leverage YouTube to the maximum extent possible.
Planning my next music release.

What’s Next?

Mostly the above – the book, the event, YouTube, music release.

You should expect to start seeing more content from me as well but understand that the projects I’m now engaging in require more from me than your average 500-word blog post. So, while I’m not ready to set expectations just yet, I will be sure to keep you in the loop as to what’s coming next (hint – maybe a new podcast?).

Thanks for reading.