Dremio · Patrick Fleming

Chapter 01

What I walked into

No written strategy, every request going through design, and AI filling the gap with whatever it could find.

There was no written brand strategy. The identity leaned on gradients that looked good in a launch video and fought you in a slide or a banner. The design system didn’t match the website, which had just been redesigned. So the brand felt different depending on where you met it, and every request went through design.

Then everyone got AI, with nothing to work from. People gave it an old PDF or pointed it at the website and hoped for something good.

It was the second time I’d seen an identity that looked good at launch struggle in daily use. The first was at Certinia.

A slide from the old template: “The World has Changed…”, with its gradient background baked in as an image. — The old template, with its gradients baked into every slide as full-bleed images.

Next: Build the handbook

Chapter 02

Build the handbook

One handbook, for people and the AI they ask.

The brand, written down

First the foundation: strategy, positioning, voice, and an identity aligned to the website’s design language, so web, print, events and video read as one brand.

Then the guidelines, split the way people work. One core guide holds the fundamentals, and each function gets its own focused rules. A field marketer reads the event rules, and skips forty pages of everything else.

I rebuilt the presentation template too, with native colour, a 33-layout library, and files light enough to email.

The same pages are written for AI as much as for people. The imagery rules draw one hard line: the logo is never AI-generated, only placed from approved files.

Guidelines page: what good imagery looks like, and the rule on AI-generated imagery. — Two pages from the live guidelines: logo clear space, and the imagery rules.

The brand as skills

One source, so versions don’t drift apart.

Then the same handbook went to the AI, as 17 production skills behind one router. It’s the same brand context, delivered a different way. Ask for a deck, a social card or an ebook, and the router sends the request to the skill that makes it.

Every skill works from the same rules, and everything the skills make ends in the same review before anyone sees it, with checks matched to what it is. Scripts catch banned words and AI tells in the copy, test palette and contrast in the layout, and audit every slide of a deck. The agent looks at the rendered file and reviews it for tone and intent, and a person reviews it before it’s published.

Dremio webinar card: Agentic analytics on the open lakehouse. — One request, start to finish, as the explainer shows it. The skill and check names are the real ones.

Next: Put it where people ask

Patrick is business oriented, focused on the outcome first, then the message, then the mechanics, all AI driven with skills built by him!

Sendur Sellakumar Chief Executive Officer, Dremio

Chapter 03

Put it where people ask

A template nobody used, a round of decks called slop, and the brand’s skills in the tool people already had open.

AI slop.

What a round of sales decks got called, a couple of months in.

In the tool they already use

By then the new template existed. People didn’t use it, because nobody wanted to build a deck by hand when an AI would draft one in seconds. So the brand had to go where they were already working, inside the AI assistant.

The skills went to the people making the most: the CEO, product marketing, the solution architects in pre-sales and field marketing. With the skills, they made their own assets without waiting on brand. Field marketing, for one, used a skill that makes their event postcards, each with a QR code carrying its own tracking link, so they can see what people engaged with at each event. Rolling them out to everyone was next when SAP acquired Dremio.

How it works, from a brief to a finished card.

The website prototype

Brief to a live page in under 60 seconds, in the prototype.

The website was the last queue. On WordPress, a new page meant a developer, a build and a wait.

Over a weekend I prototyped the replacement: the design system as coded components on Next.js and Vercel, content in Sanity, and an agent on top. It takes a brief, reads the documented strategy, product facts and brand rules, builds the page from the system’s sections, and publishes it as content a marketer can still edit.

The prototype won approval for the re-platform.

The published Dremio Open Catalog product page in the website prototype. — The five steps from a brief to a live page in the website prototype.

Next: Check what it makes

He helped shift us from thinking about design systems as a standalone discipline to building agentic workflows directly into individual workstreams, creating systems that made the broader team faster, more capable, and more self-sufficient.

Molly Sandbo Sr. Director, Product Marketing, Dremio · my direct manager

Chapter 04

Check what it makes

Everything the skills make is checked for its format before anyone sees it. If a check fails, it gets fixed or flagged for a person.

A deck from a brief

Here’s one real run. The brief asks for a prospect overview deck for a first meeting: content from dremio.com, real numbers, under ten slides. The agent loads the brand skill, researches the site, drafts the story and builds the file.

Then the part that matters. The build tools won’t save a deck that fails the checks, so the agent reads the errors and fixes them. It renders every slide, finds an overlapping subtitle and a white logo sitting invisible on a white card, and fixes those too. Twenty-four minutes, shown in sixty-nine seconds.

Slide 1 of the delivered deck — The eight slides it delivered.The eight slides it delivered. Swipe for all eight.

Slide 2 of the delivered deck — The eight slides it delivered.The eight slides it delivered. Swipe for all eight.

85 to 12agency hours a quarter

15 minto convert and check a legacy deck, from an afternoon

Most of those agency hours were decks, plus overflow like 20-page ebooks. They fell for two reasons: the workflows turn round in minutes what used to take me a day or so, and the people who needed the skills made their own.

After: the same slide on the new system, native colour and legible text. — The same slide, before and after. Drag the handle.The same slide, before and after. Tap to switch.

Before: the legacy slide with its baked-in gradient image. — The same slide, before and after. Drag the handle.The same slide, before and after. Tap to switch.

The decks that already existed

The new template fixed new decks. The library of old ones still carried full-bleed gradient images. Text contrast was a daily fight, and thirty slides of background images pushed files past email attachment limits, so they bounced or got flagged as spam.

The deck converter moves a legacy deck onto the new system and checks it in 15 minutes. By hand, it took an afternoon.

Next: The craft underneath

I use the presentation automation Patrick built myself, with it I can spin up presentations faster and more consistently than ever before.

Sendur Sellakumar Chief Executive Officer, Dremio

Chapter 05

The craft underneath

AI drafted the explainer. Making it good took a day of direction.

The homepage films started in After Effects, animated by hand. That doesn’t scale, because every change needs me. So I turned my After Effects workflows, the easing and the way things move, into code that Remotion understands, and built a plugin that ports an After Effects animation across.

Now the films are React components, and each new one starts with that animation knowledge already in context. An agent can make and change them, where in After Effects every change needed a person.

import { interpolate,
  useCurrentFrame } from "remotion";
import { AgentBubble } from "./AgentBubble";

// reach.easeOut: fast start, slow settle
const SMOOTH_INOUT =
  Easing.bezier(0.4, 0, 0.6, 1);

const lerp = (frame, f, v) =>
  interpolate(frame, f, v, clamp);

One file, both sides of the handle: the source and the animation it renders.The homepage animation, and the code that renders it. Tap to switch.

Directing the explainer

You have to see it broken before you can see it fixed.

The explainer in chapter 3 started as an AI draft, with every scene on the same clean white background. But the film shows two different things: what the person using it sees, and what happens behind the scenes. So I directed the behind-the-scenes parts onto a dark background. That separates the two, and gives the agent’s work its colour and shine.

The first cut showed the card already fixed, then the fix happening on top of it, so I sent it back. The animation wasn’t good enough first time either, so I storyboarded it frame by frame, through two rounds of boards and a treatment. Each of those decisions then goes back into the skills, so the next film starts closer to right.

Sixteen frames from the explainer: the front end on light backgrounds, behind the scenes on dark. — Front end on light, behind the scenes on dark. The first AI draft put every scene on white.

Next: What changed

Chapter 06

What changed

Teams make on-brand work without waiting. Production that took hours takes minutes. I spend less time on routine production and more on strategy and creative work, and some of that time goes back into improving the skills, so the next job is quicker.

Agentic marketing teams operate differently. Everyone is a creator, both in terms of building agents, but also in terms of building content and experiences. Brand has to operate differently in this environment. Everyone needs to be able to create enterprise-grade assets that adhere to brand standards. Few have the product management skill, agentic knowledge, and brand expertise to help construct an agentic marketing platform. Patrick is one of the rare few with the confluence of skills to excel in the agentic era.

Read Maloney Chief Marketing Officer, Dremio

Next case Certinia refresh