How Programetrix cut out tool hopping and 60% of its AI bill with ClickUp

In Frame

That pre-launch hum every agency knows

A creative asset lands for a connected-TV campaign that's days from launch. In the old routine, it would sit until someone on the team finished what they were doing, then get inspected by hand against the platform's spec — a stretch that could run one or two days before the client even heard back.

Now the check starts the moment the file arrives. A Make scenario scrapes the creative's metadata into ClickUp, a Super Agent reads it against spec, flags what would have failed, and sends the resubmission request back out. Elapsed time: about six minutes.

For an agency whose launch windows don't move, that's the difference between a client scrambling and a client going live on time. And it's the most visible piece of a bigger bet: a boutique shop deciding to run like a much larger one, without hiring like one.

A lean shop, running heavy

PrograMetrix is process-heavy on purpose. A single media plan can span six or seven ad platforms, and the agency often works as the programmatic engine behind other creative and marketing shops — the team that actually makes the campaigns run.

Wrike kept tasks moving, but that was the ceiling: a task list with nothing to build on top of it. Documentation lived in Confluence, conversation in Teams, and the work sat in three systems that didn't talk to each other. For a small team running campaigns this intricate, the real strain wasn’t disorganization at all—it was a stack that hadn’t kept up with how much the agency had taken on.

The Solution

A suite they could make their own

When Riley Tompkins, PrograMetrix's Director of Technology and AdOps, went looking for a replacement, he weighed Monday, Notion, Wrike again, and ClickUp. He wasn't shopping for a better task list; he wanted a workspace he could shape around the way the agency already worked.

Riley TompkinsDirector of Technology and AdOps, PrograMetrix

Running six or seven platforms per campaign, we needed workflows built around how we actually operate. ClickUp let us create request forms, custom Super Agents, and add our own tools and MCP servers, tailoring everything to our process instead of forcing us into someone else's.

ClickUp's Small Business Suite won on that central-hub vision and the pace the product was shipping. Folding chat in had a knock-on effect: the agency left the Microsoft ecosystem entirely and moved the rest of its stack to Google Workspace. Confluence, Teams, and Wrike collapsed into one hub — fewer vendors, a single bill, and documentation that finally lived next to the work it described.

The Impact

Riley barely opens Make anymore

The agency's automations run through Make, and this is where Riley's setup gets unusual. He built a ClickUp Super Agent that connects to Make through its MCP server and writes the scenarios itself — including the metadata-scraping scenario that feeds the creative-QA agent. What used to mean researching integrations, wiring them by hand, and debugging inside the Make UI now happens almost entirely in ClickUp.

Riley Tompkins Director of Technology & AdOps, PrograMetrix

We built a Super Agent that connects into Make via Make's MCP server to actually help us create scenarios. It almost completely eliminated the need to even interact with the Make UI, and saved us hours in setup and testing. We can rely on it as our Make scenario creator now, instead of constantly debugging and researching different ways to set up Make and ClickUp integrations.

The agent doesn't just run the automations; it builds them. "It's almost unlimited extensibility," Riley says.

Less juggling, more executing — at machine speed

That same instinct — hand the standing work to an agent — shows up across the operation:

~95–99% less time on creative QA. A check that took one to two days plus hours of manual review now clears in under six minutes, turning failed-creative turnaround from a launch risk into a formality.
~50 tasks orchestrated per launch. A single kickoff form fires around fifty tasks, each routed to the right person and sequenced at the right time, so a launch that used to be coordinated by hand across people and platforms assembles itself with nothing slipping.
Always-current client intelligence. A Super Agent pulls live campaign data from Funnel through MCP straight into tasks — Ad Ops uses it to catch and fix underperforming campaigns faster, while Client Services uses the same numbers to check in with clients more often, not less. A companion agent keeps a running client hot sheet across ClickUp, email, and Google Docs.
Strategy at the speed of a question. Media planners query Brain directly for past tactics, vendor options, and client context they'd otherwise have chased someone down for — and the account team started doing it without being told to, which is why the agency is now opening Super Agent creation to non-technical staff.

Riley TompkinsDirector of Technology and AdOps, PrograMetrix

We wanted AI native to our operations, not bolted on. With ClickUp Brain and Super Agents connected through MCP, we automatically pull campaign data from Funnel straight into tasks and run creative QA hands-free. It's almost unlimited extensibility.

Four vendors down to one line item

The consolidation showed up on the invoice.

Riley TompkinsDirector of Technology and AdOps, PrograMetrix

ClickUp let us cut several platforms — Confluence, Microsoft Teams, Wrike — and consolidate all of it into one, while actually increasing functionality and streamlining the experience. It also let us move workflows we ran in external AI tools like OpenAI and Claude inside ClickUp using Brain, Super Agents, and MCP — which cut our costs on those platforms by around 60%.

Programetrix didn't drop the outside models to save money; they decided a serious AI practice shouldn't live in four disconnected tabs. So they brought it in. Claude still does the work, now through an MCP connection inside ClickUp, where the context it needs is already sitting next to it.

Documentation that used to mean copying between tools now happens where the work already lives.

The 60% came off the software bill. What Riley and the team feels day to day is the rest of it — the QA and the constant wiring between tools that used to eat a chunk of every week, now handled without anyone babysitting it. His team got those hours back, and they go to clients now.

We asked Riley if he'd tell another boutique agency to do the same, and he doesn't hesitate: "Yeah, absolutely. There's probably not a better platform than ClickUp to do it"