Built for instructional designers who take the work seriously.
Rough Cut is the workbench we wished we had when we were running review cycles at enterprise scale. Built by practitioners, for practitioners.
Why we built it
Ascent Labs builds AI tools for the people who actually do the work. Rough Cut started as three internal tools we shipped on consulting engagements — preflight QA on storyboards before SME review, instant SME-feedback synthesis, and a revision-execution layer connecting feedback to tasks and status emails. Clients asked for them by name. We unified them.
How it’s built
Every part of Rough Cut is built around three principles. AI suggestions cite their source so IDs can trust and trace every output. Outbound actions — tasks, emails, status updates — require explicit human approval. And every feature maps to a real moment in the ID workflow, not a generic project-management abstraction.
Every great course starts rough. The work is in the cuts.
Who we are
We are practitioners first. The team includes IDs, learning designers, and engineers who have shipped enterprise training programs at scale. The depth in the product is the same depth we needed when we were the ones running review cycles.