How I cut my copywriting time in half with AI
Sharing my workflow because I see a lot of "AI can't write copy" posts and I think most of them come down to people using it wrong. This is what I've landed on after about two years of using AI daily for client work, and it's roughly halved how long i spend writing.
Step 1: Upload every relevant resource before you prompt anything.
Brand guidelines, past campaigns, creative brief, competitor pages saved as PDFs, customer review screenshots, kickoff call transcript. Whatever exists. Don't curate, just dump it in. The AI can only work with what you give it, and most bad AI copy comes from people who gave it nothing.
Step 2: Ask for a rough draft in three directions.
Same brief, three angles. Don't accept the first thing it spits out. This is the single biggest reason AI copy feels generic, people stop at draft one. Three gives you options and usually one of them has a line or structure worth keeping even if the direction itself isn't right.
Step 3: Edit it into your own voice.
Cut 30% on the first pass. Rewrite every opener. Kill every adjective you didn't personally choose. By the end it should read like you wrote it, with the AI having just saved you the blank-page problem. This is still the step that takes the longest, and it should be.
Step 4: Ask the AI to fact-check.
Numbers, claims, product details. AI invents stats that sound exactly right, and you'll skim past them because they read naturally. Ask it to go through the draft against the source docs and flag anything unsupported. Catches things your eyes miss.
On tools:
I personally use nylio.app for all of this and it genuinely saves me hours every week. The AI sits inside the document and reads the PDFs you drop in, so all four steps happen in one place. No copy-pasting the draft into a chat window, pasting the response back into the doc, then doing it again for the next paragraph. That back and forth is where most of the time goes when you're using a separate chat app and editor, and cutting it out is most of where my time savings came from. You highlight a paragraph, ask for a tighter version, see the diff, accept or reject. For the way I work it's just a much better fit than a chat window and a separate editor.
That said, the workflow is what matters, not the tool. Any AI chat plus any editor will get you the same result, it just takes more copy-pasting. ChatGPT and Google Docs worked fine for me for a year before I got tired of the friction. Use whatever you're already comfortable in.
That's the whole thing. Happy to answer questions