Grok Bot: How I'd Run a Design Studio with 15 AI Agents

Tommaso Nervegna, who runs a 100-person design studio, sketches a studio run with 15 AI agents in which humans keep creative direction, client meetings, money and judgements about people.

Tommaso Nervegna runs a 100-person design studio inside a large company and has tested Grok Bot, an AI agent product, in beta for several months. He sketches how he would run a new studio with 15 AI agents, and states plainly that the studio does not exist. His rule is that repetitive, measurable and draining tasks go to AI agents, while work that needs taste, judgement or client contact stays with people.

• One coordinating AI agent keeps the studio's records, sends him a morning summary of what needs his approval, and directs the other fourteen.
• One AI agent reads each client's design system from Figma, so that the other AI agents build pages from the client's real components.
• Each AI agent gets its own account with minimal rights and one of three levels of action: act and log it, prepare and wait for approval, or never act.
• A shared log records every approved action and who approved it, and each task is done once by hand before it is automated.

A design team handing administrative work to AI agents can write down the decisions that stay with people and assign each AI agent one of three levels of action. The piece is a thought experiment and reports no measured results.

Derived by Working Surface from the article; more in the Playbook. Source line: Automation multiplies whatever the first run did, including the mistakes.

24 October 2026: teams keep the time AI saves only when they decide in advance what an AI agent may do alone, what waits for a person and who maintains what it builds.