The one weekly email worth reading: what a report from your AI crew should contain

Most software reports are written to show that the software is busy. Charts, counts, a streak. You skim them once and then filter them into a folder. A report from an AI crew has a different job, because the crew is doing work in your name. You need to know what it did, and what is sitting there waiting for you.

Brainztem sends one email a week to the owner of a workspace on a plan. It goes out on Mondays. This post walks through what is in it and why. It also works as a checklist for judging a weekly report from any AI tool.

Four questions a weekly report should answer

• What did the crew do? Named pieces of work, not activity counts.
• What is waiting on me? The drafts and messages that cannot move until a person decides.
• What came in? Visits and messages from your website.
• What did the crew learn? The corrections and approvals it now writes from.

If a report cannot answer the second question, it is a newsletter.

What the crew did

The first section lists the week's work in plain lines. How many pieces your crew wrote, with the titles of the first three, and a note that they are under Documents. How many repeating tasks ran on schedule. How many replies it drafted to customer emails. And how many emails went out after your approval.

That last line is worded with care. Emails are not "sent by the crew." They go out after a person approved them, and the report says so each week.

Waiting on you

This is the section to read first. It lists the drafts waiting for approval under Outreach, the emails you approved but have not sent yet, and the messages that came through your website and still have no reply, with the names of the people who wrote.

A crew that drafts and waits can only move as fast as your approvals. This section is your queue.

Your website, and what the crew learned

If you have a website built in your workspace, the email gives the week's visits, whether that is up or down from the week before, and where most visitors came from. It also counts the messages that came through the site and how many of them arrived by chat.

Then comes a section headed "Your crew got sharper." It lists what your crew learned from you during the week, up to five items by name: a fact you confirmed, a page you corrected, an email you approved. Each line says how it was learned.

The email ends with the state of the brain: how many things your crew was asked that the brain does not cover yet, and how many tasks are open on the board. Under that is one link that opens your workspace.

A quiet week sends nothing

This is the rule that keeps the email worth opening. If your crew did nothing, nothing is waiting, no messages came in, nothing was learned and the site had no visits, no email is sent. Silence means there is nothing to read.

It is one email per workspace per week, never more. And if you reply to it, a person reads the reply.

How to switch it off, and what it is not

Open Settings in your workspace and choose Plan & email. There is one switch there, for the Monday email. Turn it off and nothing is sent. Turn it back on and it goes out on Mondays again. Only the owner can change it.

The Monday email is easy to confuse with the Weekly reports agent. The email comes with any plan and arrives without being asked for. The agent is an add-on, at $9, $15 or $19 a month depending on the level. You ask it for your week, and it reads your board and writes a fuller summary: what moved, what is stuck and what to do next.

Start with the email. Add the agent if you find you want the longer version.

Next Monday, open the email and go straight to "Waiting on you." Approve or edit what is there, then read what your crew learned. If you would rather look now, open your workspace and check Outreach. Not on Brainztem yet? Start the free 48-hour preview at brainztem.com. The Monday email begins once you are on a plan.