Assign the proactive production AI agent teams

In the Intensive days you built single agents: one for intake, one for concepts, one for edit packets, one for variants, one for delivery checks. Each did its own job well. None of them held the whole asset set.

That gap matters because an approved file doesn't stay one file. The olive-oil picture becomes the web-shop hero, the social square, the printed store card, next spring's reprint and a distributor's catalogue page. Now suppose the label changes and one derived layer, such as the reflection of the label in the stone, isn't rebuilt. The variant agent resized what it was given. The checking agent confirmed sizes and formats. Every agent did its job, and the stale layer still went everywhere the good one went.

A derived layer is one built from another layer, such as a shadow or a reflection of the bottle. When the bottle layer changes, its derived layers may now be wrong.

The Factory you build in this module fixes the gap with teams that share one record, and with people who own each team. Use the slider to see how far one stale layer can spread.

Scott Belsky, founder of Behance and Adobe's chief strategy officer when he was recorded, was asked how work might be organized in twenty years. He described companies built mostly from computing and organized as nodes, where departments used to be. The people at each node, he said, act as "stewards of the node": they own its objectives and its rules, and he expects those rules to matter a great deal.

Take this as one vendor-side view of the future, not a proven model. It still gives the Factory a practical rule.

• Each team gets a named human steward, a person who owns its goals and rules and answers for what it hands on.
• The team's rules are written into the shared production record before anything runs. This is the single record all teams read and write.

For the olive-oil job you will set up three teams: Brief and References, Image Production and Quality and Delivery. A proactive AI agent team is a group of agents that keeps working toward a goal without waiting to be prompted at each step. It stays inside the rules its steward wrote.

Brief and References owns what the other teams will build from. Its job covers:

• The brief. This includes the required-versus-optional split. On the olive-oil job the label, the cap and the oil's colour are untouchable. The stone, the light and any olive branch are open.
• Accepted references. These are the photographs and files the team has confirmed as the right ones.
• Source versions. The record says which version of each file is current, for example the bottle shot v2.
• Permission status. For each source the record says whether it is known to be allowed, unknown, or pending.

Its stop rules carry over from Intensive intake. If an input is missing, such as a logo file that never arrived, the team sends one follow-up and then pauses that item. It never guesses a source and never treats an unknown permission as approval. An item marked "permission unknown" stays unknown until a person changes it.

In practice, nothing reaches Image Production unless this team has accepted it, listed its version and recorded its permission status.

Image Production makes the pictures: the outdoor scene on a stone table and the nine sizes, using Firefly and Photoshop. It works only from sources that Brief and References has accepted. If a file isn't in the record as accepted, the team doesn't use it.

Its craft rules are the ones you already use:

• The original studio photograph stays locked at the bottom of the layer stack.
• Every change sits on its own layer, so it can be inspected, fixed or removed.
• The record says which parts were photographed and which were generated. The bottle is photographed. The stone, the light and the reflection are generated.

The team flags conflicts instead of solving them. Say the vertical social crop can't hold both the bottle and its reflection in the stone. The team doesn't quietly shrink the bottle or drop the reflection. It records the conflict and sends it to a person, because choosing between the two is a creative decision.

The nine sizes include the web-shop hero, the email banner, square and vertical for social, the printed store card and a distributor's catalogue page.

Quality and Delivery decides what is fit to go to the creative owner for release. It brings together the brief, the references, the working files, the exports and the notes, and checks them against each other.

It inspects the pictures as well as the records, at 100 to 200 percent. It looks at where the glass meets the stone, at the contact shadow and the reflection, and at every word of the label. A record can say "label v2 applied" while the reflection still mirrors v1.

Its rules:

• Block files that pass technical checks but fail visually or have no working source. A store card of the right size and format that shows the bottle smaller than the rest of the set gets blocked.
• Keep one exception list, so the people involved read one short list instead of scattered notes.
• Return an attractive image that was built on the wrong brief. Looking good isn't enough. It has to match the accepted brief and sources.

This team can block and return. It can't approve release. Approval stays with people, as the next step explains.

Some decisions belong to no team. Write them into the record as human-only:

• Approving images and final delivery: the creative owner.
• Resolving permissions, including whether this client accepts a generated setting at all: the producer fills that field.
• Contacting the client: a person.
• Changing or signing off the label, cap or product colour: the producer signs off the label. No team edits these.

The agents may log, chase inside the studio, size, compare, flag, block and return. They may not approve, resolve, contact or change the product.

In a one-person studio you may hold several of these roles yourself, perhaps steward of all three teams, producer and creative owner. That's fine. Still name each role separately in the record, for example "Producer: C. Bell" and "Creative owner: C. Bell". Later, anyone reading the record, including you next spring, can tell which role signed what. "Approved by C. Bell" alone doesn't say whether that was a permission decision or an image decision.

Flip the cards to test who owns each decision.

Each team's written rules answer five questions. Put them in the shared record under the team's name and its steward.

1. Accepted inputs. What may it start from? Image Production: only sources marked accepted, with a version and a permission status.
2. Required outputs. What must it return? Image Production: layered working files, the nine sizes, and a note of what was photographed and what was generated.
3. Stop conditions. When does it stop? For example, when a source is missing or unaccepted, or when a crop can't hold both the bottle and its reflection.
4. Escalation owner. Who hears about a stop? Name the steward or role, such as "Producer", not "someone".
5. Check before handing on. What does it confirm before passing work along? Image Production: every size uses the current source version, and the original is still locked.

Write a short set like this for each of the three teams. Drag the items into the order a team works through them on one item. In the next lesson you'll define the handoff table these rules depend on.