How ClickUp Uses ClickUp Brain to Turn Data into Actionable Insights

We built ClickUp Brain. Then we immediately started using it to manage our work at ClickUp, the everything app for work.

Sounds recursive, but hear us out. We had the exact same problem you do: Work Sprawl. Or thousands of tasks across dozens of projects, teams scattered across time zones, massive amounts of historical data spread across dozens of apps, that could tell us something useful—if we could just figure out what.

ClickUp Brain connected the dots we weren’t equipped to see in real time. Things like which types of dependencies actually kill timelines, which approval steps are creating bottlenecks, and which teams are stretched thin.

In this blog post, we’re walking through how ClickUp uses ClickUp Brain to turn data into actionable insights. Here’s what changed for us and what can change for you. 🪄

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What Is ClickUp Brain?

ClickUp Brain is an AI-powered assistant built into ClickUp that helps you work smarter and faster. You can interact with ClickUp Brain by mentioning @Brain in task comments or chat, just like you would mention a team member. Here’s what it can do:

• Provide instructions and answer questions using your workspace context
• Summarize workspace items like your ClickUp Tasks, comments, chats, and Docs
• Perform actions like creating tasks, updating progress statuses, posting comments, summarizing Tasks or Docs, searching the workspace, and more
• Access both public and (with permission) private items in your workspace to provide more relevant and contextual responses

You can use ClickUp Brain in various places inside your workspace, such as the toolbar, location headers, Tasks, Docs, and Chat. It’s designed to help with everything from managing tasks to generating summaries and even searching the web.

For even more power, there’s ClickUp Brain MAX, your desktop companion that brings AI-powered productivity to your entire workflow, not just inside ClickUp.

46.5% of workers are forced to bounce between two or more AI tools to complete a single task.

Brain MAX also eliminates AI Sprawl by centralizing all your AI tools and workflows in one place. You can search, create, and take action across ClickUp, your connected work apps (like Figma, GitHub, Google Drive, SharePoint), and the web, all from a single unified interface.

It’s one AI for all your work.

Learn how it works in this quick video:

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Why Actionable Insights Are Critical

Data without direction is of no help to anyone. We need insights that we can use—ones that show us what to do next, not just what happened before.

Here’s why actionable insights are so important. 👇

Spot over- and under-utilization

Some team members are stretched too thin, while others have capacity to spare. Without visibility, we miss this completely. Actionable insights reveal these imbalances quickly.

We can see who’s overwhelmed and who can take on more. This helps us redistribute work fairly and prevent burnout before it happens.

Prioritize high-impact work

Not all tasks carry the same weight. Some move the needle; others just keep us busy.

Clear insights give us permission to be ruthless. They show us which project will boost revenue, which features customers are screaming for, and which initiative looked good in the planning meeting but won’t matter six months from now.

Accelerate decision-making

When decisions drag, momentum dies. With insights at our fingertips, we cut through the delay and have the information we need when we need it. This lets us move quickly and confidently, keeping projects on track and teams aligned.

In fact, Alistair Croll and Ben Yoskvitz, authors of Lean Analytics, say:

One in five employees surveyed by ClickUp says that simply knowing when decisions will be made (better communication) would help them work faster. Yet, in the rush of a busy day, communicating timelines often falls through the cracks.

That’s where ClickUp Brain steps in. Acting as your AI-powered work copilot, it automatically gathers updates from Tasks, threads, and Docs—delivering daily digests, decision briefs, and summary comments, so you can finally stop having to chase people (or information).

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Key Features of ClickUp Brain for Actionable Insights

Here’s how we’ve woven ClickUp Brain into our own workflows to move faster, catch problems earlier, and keep teams aligned. 📋

Spot project problems before they cascade

The most expensive crisis is the one you don’t see coming. We use ClickUp Brain to surface the warning signs we’d typically miss.

Take a real scenario: our product team launched a feature that depended on three interconnected workstreams. ClickUp Brain’s ‘Find tasks that are stuck’ feature caught that the design handoff task hadn’t been updated in 12 days. That single alert prevented a two-week cascade of delays downstream.

We caught the blocker, reassigned ownership, and kept the launch on track. Without that visibility, we’d have discovered the problem at the sprint review—too late to recover.

💡 Pro Tip: Upload Excel files directly into a new ClickUp Brain chat and ask it questions about the data. Additionally, you can paste a spreadsheet link (from Google Sheets, for example) to extract insights. It helps analyze spreadsheets instantly without leaving the workspace.

Replace hours of status reporting

Executive summaries are where most teams lose hours to manual work. We generate them automatically now.

At the end of each sprint, we ask ClickUp Brain to summarize our Development Space, highlighting what shipped, what’s still in progress, and what’s blocked. It pulls from task statuses, comments, and attachments across the entire Space and distills it into a readable update that takes 30 seconds to review instead of 30 minutes to compile.

Plus, when our boss reads the summary, they see actual progress, not a list of statuses.

We tell them, ‘We shipped three features, unblocked the payment integration by reassigning the backend task, and have one blocker on the iOS build waiting for external API access.’ That’s a decision-ready update.

Make balanced workload decisions

Uneven workloads often turn into burnout, bottlenecks, and missed deadlines. We use ClickUp Brain to rebalance before that happens.

While ClickUp’s Workload View shows capacity by person, the AI assistant goes further. It analyzes everything, including task volume, due dates, complexity signals, and dependencies. So when ClickUp Brain sees one team member carrying 12 urgent tasks while another has four, it recommends specific reassignments.

Last quarter, we applied this to our design team.

ClickUp Brain flagged that one designer was carrying most of the high-priority work while others had capacity. We redistributed strategically. We were able to prevent burnout for our top performer, and throughput increased because work was completing more steadily across the team.

Build dashboards that tell us what matters

We’ve learned that the dashboards people use are the ones that make analyzing even the most complex data dead simple. Imagine dashboards that don’t stop at giving you a list of numbers—but also digestible interpretations of what those numbers actually mean. Our AI-powered Dashboards in ClickUp do exactly that.

AI Cards help us:

• Automatically pull in updates about team activity over a period with the AI Team StandUp Card
• Generate high-level overviews of project health, progress, and next steps with executive-style scoring with the AI Project Update Card
• Create custom prompts to obtain ad-hoc insights or perform different actions with the AI Brain Card
• Surface up-to-date executive summaries for leadership with the AI Executive Summary Card
• Summarize your own recent activity for standups or reporting with the AI StandUp Card

Our marketing team refreshes their dashboard every Monday morning. They see a summary of campaign progress, what’s behind schedule, and which channels are blocked—in plain English.

We’ve also built AI-powered dashboards for customer issues, sprint planning, and product analytics. Each one surfaces exactly what that team needs to make choices.

The sales dashboard shows which deals are moving and which are stuck. The engineering dashboard shows which services are healthy and which need attention. When a CEO wants to know project health, we point them to a dashboard instead of scheduling a meeting.

Connect insights to action with automations and goals

Spotting a problem means nothing if nobody acts on it. We treat insights as the start of workflows, not the end.

When AI identifies a critical overdue task, a ClickUp Automation alerts the project manager immediately. When we document lessons from a post-mortem in ClickUp Docs, we ask ClickUp Brain to extract the key takeaways and link them to our Continuous Improvement Goal.

The insight becomes part of our institutional knowledge, and the action becomes automatic.

Access multiple AI models

Thinking differently is sometimes easier when you rely on different AI tools to tackle different kinds of jobs.

When we’re brainstorming campaign angles, we need rapid-fire idea generation. When we’re architecting a product decision, we need deep logical reasoning. When we’re researching something specialized, we might need a tool that’s been trained differently. Pretending one model handles all of that equally well is just wrong.

Brain MAX lets us access Claude for deep reasoning work, ChatGPT for creative ideation, and Gemini for specialized domains. We pick based on what we’re trying to solve at that moment.

Our product team uses Claude when we’re thinking through complex tradeoffs about feature priorities, while our marketing team switches to ChatGPT when they’re exploring campaign directions.

💡 What Works for Us: We use Brain MAX + ClickUp Whiteboards as our creative command center. For example, we pick up raw ideas from the desktop companion, then drop them onto a Whiteboard in ClickUp. Then, we use real-time visuals, link them to Tasks and Docs, and let the team remix, refine, and execute without ever leaving the canvas.

Search across every tool we use

Teams today live across multiple tools: Figma has designs, GitHub has code, Google Drive has strategy docs, SharePoint has legal stuff, and ClickUp has everything else.

Finding what you need means opening tabs, switching context, remembering where you’d last seen something, and hoping you were looking in the right place.

Brain MAX changes this because it searches across all your apps simultaneously. We type ‘Show me the Figma designs for Release 2.1 and link them to the technical spec and the customer feedback we got’ and it returns the mockups from Figma, pulls the related docs from ClickUp and Drive, and surfaces conversations where we discussed what customers actually wanted from that release.

Everything shows up in one place, and everything is connected.

Speak out loud for productivity

We think faster than we type, so we capture ideas while they’re forming instead of losing them trying to find a keyboard.

Talk to Text in ClickUp Brain MAX lets us work 4x faster because the constraint of typing isn’t slowing our thinking down.

We just speak our mind, and find our thoughts formatted and organized for use in Brain MAX.

Plus, the custom dictionary ensures that AI recognizes the names, jargon, and references we use. ‘Q4 push.’ ‘Bob’s API. ‘The UX audit.’ The system writes exactly what we say instead of phonetically interpreting it. That’s the difference between dictation being a novelty and dictation being how we capture thinking.

See how one of our users is making the most of ClickUp Brain MAX:

Conduct research grounded in reality

We make decisions based on information every day, such as what our competitors are doing and how markets are shifting. If we get that information wrong, everything downstream is wrong. If you can’t trace where it came from, you can’t know if it’s right.

Brain MAX searches the web and returns results with attribution. You can click through to every source. When we use research to make decisions, we link it back to our documentation so the team sees both the insight and the evidence.

Protect your focus time

We protect focus time the way we protect meetings. ClickUp Brain inside ClickUp Planner sees your schedule, understands when you need deep work blocks, and automatically reserves that time.

More importantly, it reschedules lower-priority tasks to fit around your protected focus blocks so you’re not living in constant triage.

When something urgent comes up and threatens your focus time, ClickUp Brain reschedules your tasks intelligently instead of just pushing them into a broken calendar. It understands dependencies and deadlines, so it doesn’t move something that’s due tomorrow or block other work.

The result is uninterrupted time to do real work.

Capture meetings without living in your notes

We spend hours in meetings and hours more trying to remember what happened. Most of it doesn’t stick. Someone was typing notes while everyone else watched, which means the meeting became about documentation instead of conversation. After the call, someone has to clean up the notes, extract action items, create tasks, and distribute information.

That’s hours of work that never should have existed.

ClickUp’s AI Notetaker runs during the call and captures everything:

• Transcripts so you can search for exactly who said what
• Smart summaries that distill the call into what matters
• Action items that you can automatically turn into assigned tasks by prompting ClickUp Brain

All of that appears in your Docs, so it’s connected to your work instead of staying siloed and forgotten in a notes app.

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How Our Teams Use ClickUp Brain

Here’s how we use ClickUp Brain day-to-day across our teams—the prompts we run, the problems we solve, and the work we avoid. 😌

Project management and operations team

At the start of the week, our PMO team runs the same prompt: Find tasks in the Operations Space that haven’t been updated in 7+ days and are due within two weeks.

This catches the tasks where work just stopped. Last month, it surfaced a legal review task sitting untouched for over a week. The PM assumed legal had it, while the legal team thought they were waiting on the PM. We caught it early enough to keep the product launch on track.

What we use ClickUp Brain for:

• Generating weekly executive summaries from our Operations Space
• Identifying dependencies that are blocking multiple workstreams before anyone notices
• Pulling together status updates across projects for leadership reviews

💡 What Works for Us: In our PMO, we use AI Custom Fields to save time and keep projects on track. We create a Summary AI Field to automatically condense task descriptions, comments, and subtasks into a quick overview.

Another AI Field tracks progress by analyzing subtasks and checklists, so we always know where a task stands without manually updating anything.

Marketing and creative team

We’re running campaigns across blog content, social, email, paid ads, events, and partnerships simultaneously. When someone asks ‘What’s the status of the webinar campaign?’ we ask ClickUp Brain directly.

How we use our AI marketing tool:

• Summarizing feedback threads on blog posts so writers know exactly what to change
• Pulling campaign performance data from multiple sources into one coherent update
• Extracting key takeaways from post-launch retrospectives to improve future campaigns

Our creative team also uses ClickUp Brain to generate images for social posts, blog headers, and campaign visuals. When they need a quick concept image or hero graphic, they describe what they need, and ClickUp Brain generates it on the spot.

This is especially useful for early drafts, A/B testing different concepts, or when they need placeholder images while waiting for the final designs.

Product team

Our product managers are constantly balancing customer requests, technical debt, strategic initiatives, and team capacity. ClickUp Brain helps them see patterns across the product development process.

They rely on ClickUp’s AI knowledge management for:

• Connecting customer pain points mentioned across sales calls, support tickets, and feedback forms
• Checking the engineering team’s capacity before committing to sprint work
• Summarizing technical documentation when they need to understand system constraints

When planning the roadmap, they ask: Show me all feature requests tagged ‘enterprise-customer’ from the last quarter. ClickUp Brain pulls from customer feedback tasks, sales notes, and support tickets to show them which problems keep coming up.

Last quarter, this revealed that several enterprise customers were asking for better SSO controls. Our team had filed these requests separately and didn’t realize they were all pointing to the same underlying need. We prioritized it, shipped it, and immediately heard from customers who’d been waiting for exactly that.

Sales and customer success team

Our sales team uses ClickUp Brain like their always-available sales engineer. Before a demo, they need context fast. Similarly, our CS team needs context before replying to a customer’s concern.

So before any prospect call, reps prompt: Summarize everything we know about [Company Name]. ClickUp Brain pulls from call notes stored in task comments, synced emails, and logged interactions. They get a complete brief in under a minute instead of hunting through old tasks and trying to remember details.

Sales managers use it differently. They ask: Show me deals in ‘Proposal Sent’ with no activity in the last 10 days. This tells them exactly where deals are stuck: missing procurement documents, forgotten follow-ups, internal champions who went quiet.

Engineering team

Our engineers were constantly interrupting each other with ‘quick questions’ about how systems work. Now they ask ClickUp Brain first.

How our engineering team uses it:

• Understanding system architecture without bothering the engineer who built it
• Finding past incident reports and how we resolved them
• Pulling comprehensive sprint summaries for retrospectives

During incidents, they ask: Show me previous incidents related to [system name] and how we resolved them. ClickUp Brain surfaces past incident tasks, post-mortems, and fix details. We’re not troubleshooting from scratch every time, which translates into faster recovery.

For sprint retrospectives, instead of asking everyone to recall what happened two weeks ago, we prompt ClickUp Brain to summarize what was shipped, what blockers arose, and where velocity changed. We walk into retros with actual data.

💡 What Works for Us: We open a Task in ClickUp and ask Brain to generate subtasks. It gives us a clear step-by-step plan for sprints or incidents, so we don’t have to interrupt each other for details.

HR and People Ops team

Our People Ops team uses ClickUp Brain to make information accessible without them becoming a bottleneck for every question.

ClickUp Brain helps by:

• Answering employee questions about policies, benefits, and procedures instantly
• Compiling performance review data from actual work completed
• Analyzing workload across teams to justify hiring decisions

New hires ask ClickUp Brain directly: What’s the PTO policy? or How do I submit expense reports? It pulls from our employee handbook in Docs and points them to the right forms. They get immediate answers instead of waiting for an HR response.

What’s more, Prebuilt Agents in ClickUp, like the Answers Agent, add another layer of support by answering the questions that come up repeatedly in team ClickUp Chat channels. When someone tags the agent in a chat thread and asks about benefits, onboarding steps, or role expectations, it responds with the exact information pulled from your handbook, policies, or task notes.

Every answer includes the original source, so employees know they’re getting the correct version of the policy.

During performance review season, managers prompt: Summarize [Employee Name]’s work this quarter, including completed projects, contributions, and feedback received. ClickUp Brain compiles everything from their tasks, comments on their deliverables, and shoutouts in team channels.

Reviews become more complete and fair because they’re based on actual work, not just what happened in the last two weeks.

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Integrating ClickUp Brain with ClickUp Features

ClickUp Brain sits at the core of how we work. It’s present across our workspace, so every piece of information flows directly into the work we’re doing. 🔄

Task automation and AI agents

The real shift for us came when ClickUp Brain moved from showing us things to actually doing things.

We started with basic automation, simple if-then rules that worked when situations fit neatly into categories. Then we realized most of the work we wanted to automate required actual judgment about what should happen next.

ClickUp AI Agents monitor specific situations and take action without requiring manual intervention.

We have an Agent sitting on our customer feedback list. When someone fills out the form, the Agent reads what they said, figures out which category it belongs in, and creates tasks for the support team to follow up.

Another Agent runs at the start of each sprint. It grabs all the documents our team has written about what we’re building, pulls out the important pieces, and posts a summary in our team channel before anyone arrives at work.

That used to be the first hour of sprint planning; now the summary is ready to go. These Agents work because they understand context.

Building an AI Agent looks like a conversation. We instruct the Agent on what to look for, what information is important, and what action to take. The no-code builder lets anyone on the team set up an AI agent for data analysis without any technical expertise.

Clip transcription and summaries

We record Clips in ClickUp constantly—engineers explaining technical architecture, designers walking through mockups, product managers demoing features, customer success sharing feedback from calls.

ClickUp Brain automatically transcribes every Clip we create. Every screen recording and voice clip becomes searchable text. We can scan the transcript, jump to specific timestamps, and copy snippets without rewatching the entire video.

Our engineering team records Clips when walking through code or system architecture. ClickUp Brain summarizes the key points so team members can read the summary in 30 seconds and only watch the full Clip if they need deeper context.

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Best Practices for Maximizing ClickUp Brain’s Potential

These are some best practices our team uses to maximize the potential of ClickUp’s AI tools:

• Save and reuse effective prompts: We save the prompts that consistently produce solid results for future use and share them with the team. ClickUp Brain supports reusable prompts, so everyone can maintain consistency and save time across recurring tasks
• Chain multiple interactions: Our team plans sequences where one AI output becomes input for the next task. We generate initial ideas, ask ClickUp Brain to critique them, then refine based on that critique. This mirrors human collaborative processes at machine speed
• Regularly review and refine: We make it a point to review our existing ClickUp Brain prompts, workflows, and AI Agents from time to time. Continuous refinement ensures the AI stays aligned with our business goals and reflects our team’s current context
• Use AI as a strategic devil’s advocate: The team prompts ClickUp Brain to find flaws, risks, and blind spots after developing strategies. For example, ask ‘What are the three biggest ways this could fail?’ to strengthen ideas before implementation
• Try temporal prompting for scenario planning: We model different future scenarios by asking ClickUp Brain ‘How would this strategy perform if economic conditions worsen in Q3?’ This forward-thinking approach helps us build more resilient strategies
• Let AI be our personal bias detector: Then, we ask ClickUp Brain to identify hidden assumptions, cognitive biases, and logical fallacies. AI becomes an objective mirror for the mental traps that often sabotage human judgment
• Optimize role-based access: Our team also reviews and adjusts team permissions in ClickUp Brain, ensuring everyone can use AI effectively. We ensure admins/owners have full access, while guests/limited members maintain appropriate restrictions for security and workflow consistency

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Connect the Dots (+ the Data) with ClickUp Brain

We built ClickUp Brain to think the way we do. Every day, it helps us see what our instincts overlook and what our teams need before they ask. We don’t waste time parsing spreadsheets or chasing updates; we talk to ClickUp Brain, and it talks back with answers that matter.

For us, AI is how work breathes. It spots patterns before they become problems, surfaces insights that sharpen decisions, and connects conversations to context in real time. When we plan a launch, close a sprint, or write a blog post like this one, ClickUp Brain stands behind every decision to organize, refine, and remind.

Each task, comment, and conversation teaches the system how we think and what quality means to us. ClickUp Brain and Brain MAX learn through our work and return that learning in sharper focus and faster clarity.

If you want to experience work that learns with you, sign up for ClickUp today! ✅

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