How to use AI like your smartest coworker, not just a productivity hack
Meet the marketing mind behind Claude — and steal her tips to get more out of your partnership with AI.
I’m concerned by how I’ve seen marketers and executives leveraging AI lately.
I think, at its core, the problem is laziness. Despite my obvious judgment, I can also empathize. Many marketers, especially those at fast-paced startups, are drowning in both work and pressure. Humans are programmed to look for shortcuts, and that’s usually how AI is pitched to us: as efficiency tools to save time and effort.
One AI assistant is taking a different approach. You’ve probably heard of Claude, and you may have even seen the brand’s “Keep Thinking” campaign that launched last week. Insead of quick productivity hacks, Claude poses a challenge: ask harder questions. Behind that smart strategy is smart marketing — and one of the minds shaping it is Lani Assaf.
Lani started popping up in my LinkedIn feed a few months ago. Her posts immediately caught my attention because how she talked about her work with AI (she calls it an “expansive partnership”). I reached out to Lani to learn more about her role, her relationship with AI, and, selfishly, to steal her tips for working with Claude. Trust me, you’re gonna want to read this.
Can you tell me about your role at Anthropic and the key challenges or questions you spend most of your time working on?
I work on brand comms & marketing at Anthropic. Currently, I lead Claude’s organic social presence across platforms.
The key challenge I'm working on is building a meaningful brand and cultural presence in a space where there’s a LOT of noise & attention at the moment.
I spend most of my time on three things:
Strategic Content: Creating a cohesive social strategy that’s engaging for our core audiences.
Creative Campaigns: Right now I'm working on Claude’s Keep Thinking campaign (that just launched this month!)
Building Scalable Systems: Since social touches so many parts of the org, I focus on creating frameworks and programs that teams across the company can contribute to.
How would you describe your relationship with AI, and how has it evolved since you began working at Anthropic?
My relationship with AI has evolved from seeing it as a tool to experiencing it as a thinking partner.
Before Anthropic, I used AI the way most people do - for efficiency, automation, getting things done faster. Now I use Claude the way I'd work with a really insightful colleague who helps me see new patterns and come up with fresh insights and ideas.
The biggest shift happened when I realized AI's greatest value is in how it expands your thinking. I started thinking about AI as collective intelligence - a collaboration with all accumulated human knowledge. On this topic, I recommend this video by Sari Azout: Why we should use AI to expand what it means to be human.
Now, I keep running conversations with Claude about creative concepts, strategy questions, random observations. It's become this space where I can really explore ideas. Every conversation we have builds on the last, compounding context and understanding.
I find the further you go with Claude, the more you begin to create things. It’s a partner for the gap between vision and execution. My relationship with Claude is deep because it helps me create things that matter, to me.
So it's become less about the technology and more about the possibilities it creates for human creativity and connection.
What’s one of the most surprising or interesting ways you’ve personally used Claude?
The most deceptively simple thing I've done that's had an outsized impact is creating an AI feedback vault. It's become my all-time favorite way to use Claude.
The rest of this conversation is for paid subscribers.
Below, Lani shares the specific ways she uses AI in her day-to-day work — including how she frames prompts, pressure-tests ideas, and gets ahead of her manager’s feedback.
