Katmai

First, sorry for the lack of Jan updates. To say sorry, here’s a mega-update.

Welcome to Briefly 1.38, also known as our Katmai Release.

Katmai sees a complete overhaul of the brief builder experience - one that’s faster, smarter and richer. I think you’re going to love it.

Inspo as you go

We’ve brought Inspo on Briefly to the brief builder. Now, as you’re drafting your brief, you can ask Briefly to find you relevant campaigns (or click the ‘Find inspo’ button). See something you like? Add it to your outline in a single click.

What’s up doc?

You might already have a bunch of docs in your Brand Canvas, and Briefly will have access to these as it helps you draft your brief. But what if you have a one-off doc that you just received and would be really helpful context for the brief you’re writing?

For instance, a new piece of audience research that just landed, or product specs for an upcoming launch.

Well, now you can upload it as you go. (And you can even add it to your Brand Canvas for next time without leaving your brief.)

Today, we support Word docs & PDFs, but if there are more file types that you’re desperate to upload, let us know and we can look at supporting them (psst you can still upload any file format to your Brand Canvas directly).

Docs, modes & smarter convos

Searching docs on demand

What’s that right next to the ‘Find inspo’ button? Oh yeah, you can now explicitly ask Briefly to search your docs for relevant material. This should make navigating your data faster and easier. And don’t worry - Briefly will still suggest intel to you on its own when it thinks it’s relevant. This shiny new button just gives you a bit more control!

Going fast and going slow

Here are two pieces of feedback we recently received:

1. “I loved the chatbot, felt really good to explore different ideas and play around with stuff before writing the brief”
2. “I wish I could just get the first draft sorted faster”

You can see our predicament… The reality is that plenty of users know exactly what they need before they come to Briefly, and plenty of others don’t.Rather than create a middle-ground that doesn’t solve either’s problem, we’ve created different modes. They allow you to choose how Briefly moves through the conversation.

• There’s “Default” mode, which is more of a ranging conversation - Briefly will ask follow-up questions, challenge you to improve your thinking, and suggest new ideas based on your docs.
• And there’s “Direct” mode for those that just want to get their brief done - Briefly will make sure the basics are covered and otherwise get out your way, so you can get to a first draft in double quick time.

Everything else

Everything else is actually 8000 new lines of code. Which is pretty crazy come to think of it.Here are some highlights…

🪹 Supported writing briefs without a Brand Canvas (so you can get started right away)
🤝 Allowed agencies to write briefs on behalf of their clients
📧 Majorly improved how you share briefs with your agency, peers, and guest users
🙇 Created new “Guest” user roles for limited workspace access and clearer RBAC
⌨️ Added a “Copy to clipboard” export option
⚙️ Added a new auto-create button that speeds up new client creation using clever brand API stuff
🤖 Rebuilt the Discovery Questions AI to enable smoother, smarter conversations
💭 Added thinking states to chatbot so you know what it’s getting up to
🌊 New default Flows for asset requests, media and campaign briefs
🍞 Added new toasts for clearer and nicer alert messages
🏓 Oh and we migrated our entire database to improve networking speeds

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‍We ship major updates every two weeks (this one just took a little longer!).
This was part of our Katmai release.Katmai is a National park in Alaska, USA.

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