2025 — present
ClickUp's AI super app. One contextual AI across desktop, browser, and mobile, built to end AI sprawl.
The problem
AI sprawl is the silent productivity killer
Users juggling ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and vertical AI tools. Each with its own login, context window, and subscription. Every switch loses context. Every copy-paste loses time.
Key metrics
74.9
CSAT score
Highest satisfaction of any ClickUp feature. Platform average: 65.5
100%
Blind Test Win
Users preferred Brain over standalone ChatGPT and Claude in head-to-head evaluations
#1
Product Hunt
Product of the Week in both Productivity and Artificial Intelligence
User satisfaction
+9.4
Points above ClickUp's overall CSAT
AI scored 74.9 vs the platform's 65.5, making it the highest-rated feature in the product.
That was a momentum…
Three surfaces, one AI
Design scope for V.0
We used our existing backend to launch a new platform without legacy baggage—built for rapid experimentation.
Desktop App
The foundation
Standalone Mac/Windows app. New visual language, multi-model chat, Talk to Text, connected Home screen.
Chrome Extension
Brain in the browser
400px sidebar constraint. Floating bubble, page summarization, Gmail capture, new tab Home.
Mobile
Voice-first
iOS app. Talk to Text as primary input. Radical density reduction. Full workspace context in your pocket.
Initial team
Before release
1
CEO
1
Designer
1
Engineer
Current team
Starting 1 month before release
2
Leadership
3
Designers
8
Engineers
2
PMs
1
EM
Initial design
“We need to build, one AI app to rule them all!”
CEO
Refining scope
We needed to take a more systematic approach and add more structure, including “Search and interact within your data” and the clear principle of “Keep the best models in one place.”
Model switching moved from a multi-step flow to a single inline picker. The Home screen lost its calendar widget density and gained contextual action cards. The result was a tighter surface that did fewer things but landed each one cleanly.
How to engage users more?
Talk to Text
Feature
Talk to Text lets you speak instead of type, anywhere in Brain MAX. Hold a key, talk naturally, and your words become formatted tasks, messages, or docs with full workspace context. 4x faster than typing, with @mentions mid-dictation. 46% of daily users adopted it in week one unprompted.
More user acquisition…
Chrome extension
The Chrome extension makes Brain MAX ambient. Instead of switching apps, AI lives in your browser: a floating bubble for instant summarize, bookmark, or dictate on any page. New tab becomes Brain MAX Home with full connected search. Zero distance between seeing something and acting on it.
Never went to production because of security issues
Next step
Brain MAX mobile puts the full AI in your pocket. Voice-first by default: Talk to Text is the primary input because speaking on a phone is natural, typing isn't. Same workspace context, same models, radically simplified density. The app shipped as a standalone surface on iOS and Android, not a feature buried inside ClickUp, so it launches in under a second and does one thing well: answer, act, create.
Mimic competitors UI
We created a design language tied to a specific model. This was done to give the user the impression that they are still using either code or ChatGPT, without ever leaving ClickUp.
Time to bring all to ClickUp Universe
All the features from the mobile app were adapted for CU at virtually no additional cost, since everything was built on the same platform and reused the same components.
Brain 2.0 on WEB and desktop…
After sorting everything out individually and getting the backend in order, we were finally ready to migrate everything to the main app and the web.
Key metrics — Jun 22–26
34.8K
DAU
up from ~20.9K baseline (+67%)
87,451
WAU
unique users touched Brain² that week
94%
CSAT
Huge shot out to the team! We made it!