Partner Story Β· in conversation with Carazo Creative. This is a written interview submitted through Submit Your Story. The claims below are the founder's own, presented as they were given to us. No payment was involved.
Carolina Monestel, founder and CEO of Carazo Creative. Photo: courtesy of the founder.
Most agencies that launch an AI product start from the product. Carolina Monestel started from an invoice she did not want to keep paying: her own people's hours, spent on work nobody hired them to do.
"We realised talented people were spending too much time pulling data, building reports, researching, checking what changed, and figuring out what actually needed attention before they could get to the work they were hired for."
That sentence is the origin of Cora, the software her agency now runs on and has begun selling.
The founder
Monestel founded Carazo Creative in 2021 and runs it from Miami. Her background spans brand, creative, digital marketing, ecommerce and growth.
She is also the author of six books. The series, She's Got Influence, includes Design Your Success, She Means Business and InfluenceHer, and the sixth is called Smart Girls Use AI: The Woman's Guide to Using AI to Market, Scale, and Future-Proof Your Brand. It ships with a thirty-day AI kickstart and fifty prompts written for specific tasks.
Which makes the order of events worth noticing. She wrote the practical guide to using AI in marketing first. Cora is what happened when she applied that thinking to her own company instead of somebody else's.
The problem, from inside an agency
The work at Carazo Creative runs across SEO, paid media, analytics, ecommerce, creative, research, reporting and AI visibility. Each of those lives on a different platform, and each platform holds a piece of the answer.
"There is an enormous amount of information involved, and it lives across different platforms."
That is the tax. Before an analyst can say anything useful about a client's month, they have to open six tools, export from each, line the numbers up, notice what moved and decide what deserves attention. The thinking part, the part the client is actually paying for, starts after all of that is finished.
Monestel frames the question every founder in a services business is asking this year, and she puts it more precisely than most: "How do you use AI to make your company more efficient without automating away the people, judgment, creativity and expertise that made it valuable in the first place?"
What Cora does
Cora pulls information from across those areas into one system, then uses AI to analyse it: identify what changed, surface opportunities, and turn a large pile of data into something a person can act on.
Her point about why that needs AI rather than another dashboard is the sharpest thing in the interview.
"The problem isn't just collecting more data. Most marketing teams already have more data than they know what to do with. The harder problem is making sense of it."
Anyone who has bought a reporting tool knows the failure mode she is describing. The dashboard arrives, it is beautiful, and someone still has to sit down and work out what it means.
The public product page makes the same argument in commercial terms. Six subscriptions get you six dashboards that do not talk to each other. Cora is one system, and the company treats that as the entire point.
The stack, named
Monestel is specific about what runs underneath, which is rarer than it should be in this category.
Cora uses Anthropic's API as its primary AI engine, combined with the agency's own databases and marketing data to analyse performance and identify opportunities. Alongside it, the platform calls the APIs of OpenAI, Google Gemini, xAI, Anthropic and Perplexity to track how visible a client is across the major AI platforms, plus SERP data for search visibility.
That second use is worth pausing on, because it is a service that did not exist three years ago. Clients now need to know not only where they rank on Google but whether an AI answer mentions them, which sources it pulled from, and where competitors appear instead. Cora's modules cover that ground directly: organic footprint and topical gaps, AI visibility with sentiment and share of voice, live reporting, a content calendar that schedules across Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok and Facebook, social insight and creator intelligence, and paid guardrails.
"Search is no longer ten blue links," as the product page puts it.
Where she stops it
The most quotable part of Monestel's answers is about restraint, and it comes from running the thing rather than theorising about it.
"'Can AI do this?' is not the same question as 'Should AI do this?'"
Her line is drawn by task, not by department. If someone is spending hours collecting information from different systems, comparing numbers or doing repetitive research, she wants technology taking that over. If the question is how a brand should position itself, whether an idea is any good, how to handle a complicated client problem, or what a set of numbers means for that particular business, she wants a person on it.
"I don't think the companies that get the most value from AI will necessarily be the ones that automate the most. I think they'll be the ones that get really good at deciding what technology should do and what people should continue to own."
She is equally clear about what that means for her own industry: "We aren't trying to automate an agency out of existence. We're trying to automate the parts of the job that get in the way of talented people doing their best work."
Built for themselves first
Cora's first customer was Carazo Creative.
"We built it around work we were already doing for real clients, then used it ourselves. That gave us a very direct feedback loop. If something didn't save time, make information easier to understand, or help us identify what needed attention, we knew immediately because our own team was using it."
That is the strongest thing about the product, and it also explains its shape. A tool built by an agency for its own analysts is designed around the actual sequence of a working day, not around a feature list assembled to win a comparison chart. The public page is blunt about what it is not: not a white-labelled reseller tool, not a stack of subscriptions with a logo on it.
On traction, Monestel volunteers the limitation before anyone asks for it.
"We're still early in the external SaaS stage, so I'd rather be transparent about that than dress early traction up as something it isn't. What we have proven is that the problem is real enough that we built a solution for ourselves before we ever decided to sell it to anyone else."
Cora has been released as an application, and the agency's clients reach it through a live portal rather than a monthly recap. Beyond that, the external customer base is at the beginning, and she says so plainly.
What is next
Growing Cora past the agency that made it, learning from how people use it, and building around problems marketing teams actually have rather than adding AI features because the market expects them.
The longer ambition is a different kind of firm: human creative and strategic expertise combined with proprietary technology, so that the same people work with more information, better visibility and far less manual work. She is looking for early customers and partners thinking about the same question she started with, which is how to get more out of AI without losing the expertise the business was built on.
Cora is at carazocreative.com/cora.
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This is a Partner Story: a written interview with a company building with AI, submitted through Submit Your Story and published free of charge. Statements about the company's product, customers and results are its own. Building something with AI? Tell us about it.
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