Most of the conversation around AI in our industry is about the fancy and exciting tools — generative images, AI video creation, AI influencers, etc. All interesting for sure. But, that’s not where AI is changing my life as a producer.
The biggest gains I’ve seen have come from the most boring parts of my job.
I’ve been using AI not to make cooler content, but to run my production company more efficiently; to reduce wasted hours, eliminate duplication, and build internal systems that actually scale. It’s not exciting, but it’s incredibly effective.
Here are two very real examples from the last few months:
1. Accounting & Recon: From 30 Hours to 2
Accounting used to take me upwards of 30 hours per month. It’s complex in production — every project has new suppliers, different cost structures, and inconsistent documentation.
Here’s what my old process looked like:
- Manually reconcile hundreds of transactions across multiple bank accounts
- Match each line to a specific project, cost category, and VAT allocation
- Upload and label all receipts and invoices to Xero
- Add extra context for my accountant to make sense of unusual line items
- Cross-reference line items in our Google Sheets project budgets
Now? That’s down to 2 hours a month, thanks to a stack of tools working together — most of them wired up with the help of ChatGPT.
Here’s how it works now:
Google Sheets: My main budget tracking lives here. I used ChatGPT to write a custom Apps Script that watches for newly added receipts and expense data. Once I click a check box for any line-item, that script extracts invoices and receipts from the embedded hyperlinks, then formats, renames, and sends them for processing to Hubdoc.
Hubdoc: This tool acts as a smart middleman. The script pushes documents into Hubdoc, which uses machine learning to:
- Recognize suppliers
- Auto-tag accounting categories and VAT codes
- Learn from previous entries
- Then sends clean entries to Xero.
Xero: My cloud accounting software.
- My accountant pretty much just needs to make sure the information is correct and identify anything that’s been incorrectly input.
- Thereafter, they only need to approve and reconcile.
- The bulk of the admin is already handled upstream by the system.
2. Crew Database: From Call Sheets to a Living Asset
Managing crew details across jobs used to be chaotic. Every new job meant retyping names, emails, dietary needs, phone numbers — over and over — into call sheets, travel docs, catering lists, and more.
So I built a system.
Step 1: I pulled 2.5 years of past call sheets from my archive. I used ChatGPT to:
- Learn the structure of my call sheets
- Extract all the crew info into a clean CSV: names, emails, agencies, dietary info, roles, etc.
That data became the foundation of my Airtable crew database — now with 400+ vetted profiles.
Step 2: I used Apps Script (via ChatGPT again) to connect Google Sheets with Airtable.
- Built a custom sidebar UI inside Google Sheets
- Search crew by name
- Insert their full info into selected cells
- Update their info and sync it back to Airtable
- Add new crew directly from Sheets into the database
Step 3: Automate Everything Else. Each job has a “Crew Info” sheet inside its project file. Once I enter a crew member’s info, formulas auto-populate:
- Call sheets
- Dietary lists
- Schedules
- Budget lines
- Travel docs
The Real Opportunity? Everyday AI
What I’ve learned: AI isn’t just about creative execution — it’s just as powerful for creative operations.
The tools I’m using aren’t futuristic. They’re here, they’re available, and they’ve already made me a faster, leaner producer. The real unlock isn’t the tool itself — it’s in figuring out where AI can quietly take over the bits of your job that drain time but don’t require creative energy.
I’ll keep sharing these as I go. This is how I’m using AI today to run better productions, with less stress and more time to focus on what actually matters.