COS accelerated campaign production by 90% with an AI-powered workflow in Asana

Highlights

Challenges

• Time-intensive campaign setup: Each new seasonal campaign required 12–14 hours of manual setup, with managers building trackers from scratch in Excel.

• Cross-functional coordination complexity: Briefs arrived via email with missing information, leading to additional clarification cycles and a 60% error correction rate.

• Inefficiencies in asset planning: A lack of standardization meant teams often requested and produced assets that were ultimately not needed.

Solutions

• AI-powered intake: AI Studio analyzes Forms submissions for completeness, flagging gaps before a project is even created.

• Automated project scaffolding: A single submission triggers the automatic generation of 50+ structured subtasks with assigned owners and cascading deadlines.

• Intelligent quality checks: Asana AI Teammates proactively review assets, catching issues before they reach production.

Outcomes

• £84,100 in annual capacity unlocked, equivalent to returning 1.53 full-time employees to strategic work.

• 90% reduction in campaign setup time, dropping from nearly two days of work to just minutes.

• 2x increase in asset output, allowing the team to deliver over 1,000 assets per campaign compared to the previous 500-600.

Our teams are focused on rethinking how work flows across the organization to ensure we are prioritizing high-impact initiatives that deliver real value to our customers. By building scalable workflows and leveraging AI with intention, we’ve been able to increase visibility and speed while focusing our energy on strategic execution. Innovation happens when teams collaborate, experiment, and commit to working smarter.”

Winner: 2026 Work Innovation Leader, EMEA

This award recognized COS for its pioneering use of AI-powered workflows to solve complex creative production challenges in the fast-paced fashion industry. By embedding AI directly into the architecture of work, COS has established a new global benchmark for enterprise-scale retail execution.

Stage 1: Intelligent intake and brief validation

Previously, the creative request process spanned multiple tools and regional workflows, where campaign managers spent days chasing briefs across departments and manually routing assets to regional teams. COS solved this by implementing a centralized intake system that uses AI as a quality gate. This new workflow ensures that every creative brief is validated for completeness at the point of entry, reducing downstream coordination caused by incomplete information.

• AI-led validation: AI Studio analyzes intake Forms for completeness and proactively flags gaps before a project is ever seen by a human.

• Proactive clarification: If a submission is unclear, the system requests immediate clarification, eliminating the back-and-forth that previously consumed hours per campaign.

• Standardized framework: By requiring a stringent set of inputs, COS ensures that teams only request assets that are strictly necessary, reducing asset wastage.

• Human-in-the-loop validation: Senior global project managers maintain oversight of the intake queue to ensure all validated requests align with current seasonal priorities.

Asana has provided a single, structured entry point for work. By ensuring quality at the point of intake, we removed complexity downstream and shifted our teams from reactive execution to proactive, strategic work.”

Stage 2: Automated project generation and assignment

Before Asana, project teams spent up to 8 hours manually setting up trackers and task lists for every new campaign. COS replaced these administrative tasks with an automated project engine that builds the entire work structure instantly. This workflow adapts to the specific requirements of the campaign, ensuring that creative and content teams have a clear, pre-structured path to execution as soon as a brief is approved.

• Instant project generation: Upon form validation, AI Studio automatically generates a full campaign project with 50+ structured subtasks.

• Dynamic assignment: Using AI Studio, AI-powered rules intelligently assign tasks to appropriate team members based on asset type, region, and current team capacity.

• Cascading deadlines: The system automatically sets deadlines across the entire project lifecycle based on the final campaign launch date.

• Contextual handoffs: Every task carries the full history and context of the intake form, ensuring zero loss of information as work moves between departments.

The workflow has become seamlessly embedded into our day-to-day operations, removing manual setup work and creating a more scalable process for campaigns.”

Stage 3: AI-monitored production and quality control

As COS scaled its use of Asana, it moved beyond standardised task management to treat its workflows as a strategic system that could be engineered and optimized. The brand is now expanding its use of Asana AI Teammates to support further complex workflows that require more bespoke AI capabilities. These use cases will further enable teams to push beyond their everyday ways of working and free up further time for more creative and strategic work.

Proactive error detection: AI Studio monitors work-in-progress to flag potential issues before they cascade, reducing error correction time by 60%.

• Automated status management: Rules manage transitions between production stages and trigger notifications to stakeholders as soon as blockers are identified.

• Intelligent quality checks: Asana AI Teammates review completed assets to ensure they meet the requirements defined in the original brief.

• Global alignment: Automated rules keep regional marketing teams and ecommerce stakeholders synced on asset readiness, preventing delays in local market delivery.

We’ve seen a lot less back and forth between teams. It's a much more streamlined process with regional teams now, catching issues proactively rather than reactively.”

Stage 4: Strategic reporting and global visibility

Leadership previously relied on multiple reporting sources across teams and regions that were often outdated by the time they were reviewed. COS established a real-time reporting layer using Portfolios to provide a single source of truth for all active campaigns. This workflow allows executive sponsors to monitor global delivery and make data-informed decisions about resource allocation and growth.

• Portfolio-level dashboards: Leadership uses Portfolios to track progress across brand, ecommerce, and sustainability in one unified view.

• Live status updates: The system replaces manual reporting with automated status summaries, providing an always-current view of project health and timelines.

• Data-driven decision making: By capturing all work in one ecosystem, COS can now analyze throughput and asset performance to optimize future campaign planning.

• Cross-brand scalability: The visibility and efficiency of this model were so clear that sister brand Weekday purchased Asana specifically to replicate the COS workflow.

Asana hasn’t merely improved our processes—it has redefined how we work. We have established a unified and transparent ecosystem where all work is seamlessly visible.”

Conclusion

Before this transformation, COS managed campaign production through a combination of existing tools and processes that supported the brand’s growth. By building an AI-native engine in Asana, COS has been able to streamline collaboration, reduce manual coordination, and give teams more time to focus on high-impact creative strategy. The impact has been so significant that other teams are now adopting the model organically, positioning COS as an operational innovator across the wider organization. As the brand continues to scale, its AI-powered infrastructure ensures that speed and quality can grow together, not at each other’s expense.