We Invited an AI Assistant to Intern with Us
Could an AI assistant become a productive member of your team in just four weeks?
We decided to find out and invited one to join Ink for a month, welcoming them as we would a human intern (minus the celebratory lunches): with proper onboarding, real work to complete and an honest two-way performance review at the end.
Onboarding
For the trial, we chose Lindy because it combined four things we were looking for: an extensive integration ecosystem, the ability to leverage multiple leading language models behind the scenes, a straightforward setup process and competitive pricing.
With those foundations in place, we got to work.
Four Areas We Happily Delegated
Coordination – Keeping projects moving
Triaging inboxes and preparing daily briefings that surfaced priority emails, meetings, tasks and follow-up actions.
Recording meetings, producing transcripts and summarising discussions with action items and owners.
Creating and coordinating project tasks, deadlines and dependencies from meetings, documents and client requests to keep work on track.
Research - Accelerating Information Gathering
Compiling information on key events and industry opportunities, including dates, deadlines and logistical requirements of organisers and suitable suppliers.
Monitoring media coverage and industry developments, bringing together news and announcements from multiple sources into a single briefing.
Conducting background research ahead of meetings to provide business context.
Organisation – Transforming information into usable resources
Extracting text, captions, tables and lists from documents and images.
Summarising dates, deadlines, action items and insights from lengthy documents, email chains and technical manuals.
Translating foreign-language correspondence and documents while preserving formatting, tables and context.
Quality Assurance - Reducing human error
Verifying spelling, names, job titles and organisations across documents.
Reviewing recurring documents, such as annual reports, and producing a checklist of required updates.
Flagging missing or unverified information for human review before action.
The Ones We Refused To Outsource?
Client Communication
Lindy is capable of drafting and sending emails on your behalf, a feature we disabled on day one. No matter how good the draft, client communication should never be automated. Relationships, judgement and industry context matter, not to mention a sign of respect. Who wants to talk to a robot?!
Content Creation
Great content starts with a clear idea. Our role is to identify that idea, build a compelling through-line around it and strip away anything that doesn't serve the message. Our test is simple: if someone can't summarise the content after reading it, it probably wasn't clear enough.
AI excels at gathering, transforming and synthesising information. It can produce polished, confident prose, yet often without a clearly defined message or point of view. The words may sound right, but they're rarely memorable.
Would we hire her again? Absolutely.
But the bigger takeaway isn’t whether Lindy is a good AI assistant. It’s that this is a fast-moving space, with new tools and capabilities emerging all the time. There are plenty of impressive AI tools out there; the harder question is knowing which ones are right for the job.
That’s why we’re testing them ourselves. Building first-hand experience helps us understand where these tools genuinely add value, where they fall short and where human expertise still matters.
So when clients ask us how we're utilisting AI and how they could benefit from it, we can answer from experience rather than theory.
