An (Intelligent) Automation A Day Keeps The Competition Away!

Combine the powers of AI and Automation to blow your competitors out of the water!

In this new era of AI-in-everything, if you’re not automating the most tedious processes in your company, you will be left behind.

But no fear - Pam Ann AI is here! My goal in this newsletter is to help you go from AI mystery to AI mastery.

Before we get into AI and “intelligent” automation, let’s rewind a bit and talk about “plain old” automation - before AI entered our lives.

Plain-Old Automation

I’ve actually been automating pieces of my business (and my life) since workflow automation tools became a thing. I started with IFTTT, then got into Zapier, which I still use the most. Recently, I’ve also started tinkering with Make.com and Microsoft Power Automate.

All of these tools do essentially the same thing: they connect isolated systems that are typically siloed off from each other, and they complete routine tasks that don’t require any decision-making. They eliminate the need for a human to do tedious tasks like copy/pasting a document from one place to another.

A Few Examples of Things I’ve Automated:

• For my marketing agency:

  • When a client sends me an email with “Urgent” in the subject line, a text message alert gets sent to my cell phone so I can act on the message immediately.

  • We use Zoom for all client calls and record them to refer back to. When a call ends, a link to the recording and the AI summary for the meeting gets sent to Slack for easy reference in the future.

  • We use Teamwork for time tracking. When a Zoom call ends, the amount of time I spent on the call gets automatically logged in my time tracking on Teamwork.

• For my short-term rental business, if I get a new booking on Airbnb, an automated message gets sent to the renter with a link to a Google Form for them to fill out, which collects all the info that the HOA requires, puts it into the HOA’s renter application form template, and emails it to their office. (This is a HUGE time saver!)

• My husband has to generate tedious email reports for work, so I created a Google Form where he fills out the necessary data, and the automation automatically puts it in the proper email template and sends it.

My Favorite Automation: Client Onboarding

My most impactful automation to date is for client onboarding in my marketing agency. Taking on a new client, or even a new project for an existing client, requires me to do tasks in many different places: Quickbooks for billing, Teamwork for project management, Slack for project communications, Google Drive for file storage, etc.

This used to take one or more hours to do manually, but now it happens automatically with no human interaction at all. This work went from 1+ hours per project to 0 hours, 0 minutes, and 0 seconds!

How I Automated My Client/Project Onboarding

For this automation, I used Zapier. It started out simple, but I added more steps over time. I still add to it regularly to make it even more robust.

The automation is triggered when a new proposal is signed in DocuSign. A link to the proposal is then added to a financial auditing Google Sheet that I share with my bookkeeper (shoutout to the amazing Angee Wentz!).

After that, a project is created in Teamwork, and a copy of the proposal is uploaded there. Task lists and team members are added automatically.

The automation then splits into two paths: one for new clients and one for existing clients. We use Google Drive to store project files, so if it’s a new client, it will create a folder, and if it’s an additional project for an existing client, it will find their folder and add the signed proposal file to it.

Next, a Slack channel is either created (if a new client) or located (if an existing client), and a message with the proposal attached is sent.

Lastly, a customer record is either created or located in Quickbooks, and an invoice is created and sent.

This automation has saved me SO many hours of work!

Here’s The Best Part…

All of this I’ve mentioned thus far is done with “plain old” automation tools (no AI in the mix).

AI “Enters the Chat”

As if “plain old” automation wasn’t powerful enough on its own, it is now possible to integrate AI into automation routines, turning them into “Intelligent Automations” or “IAs.”

In Zapier, this simply involves adding steps to your Zaps that reach out to ChatGPT or Gemini (or use Zapier’s built-in AI tool) which will do whatever you ask for with the information you feed it from your other connected tools.

This is a GAME. CHANGER.

But wait! There’s more!

Recently, a new category of automation tools has been born: AI agents.

An AI agent is basically the lovechild of automation and AI! Agents are software tools that combine the capabilities of traditional automation tools like Zapier with the powers of AI tools like ChatGPT. A whole new category of the AI industry now exists for this called “Agentic AI.”

AI agents are like putting “plain old” automations on steroids! That element of decision-making (which requires learning and reasoning), which was formerly impossible in workflow automation, is now very much a possibility.

An AI Agent Example: Virtual Project Manager

Imagine having a virtual project manager - essentially an invisible robot - that is trained specifically on YOUR business processes (as opposed to the often-worthless generic AI chatbots that are now baked into everything).

An AI agent is TRAINABLE - constantly learning about your company as it reads your emails, scans the tasks in your project management system, reads your SOPs, summarizes your calls for you, monitors your team’s internal chat, etc.

It learns your company culture, your writing style, even your technical expertise - and is not restricted by the capacity limitations of a human brain. Even the smartest human can only process a finite amount of information in their short-term memory at any given moment.

Since AI agents actually learn, and since LLMs like ChatGPT now have reasoning capabilities, that means they can perform decision-making. An agent can decide, on its own, that something needs to be done - and do it. For you. On its own. 🤯

This is quite literally a dream come true for me. My employees and I no longer need to waste our time taking infinite notes, scanning endless emails, and searching through years and years of Slack messages and Google Docs as we try to remember things.

Our brains are finally freed up to work on our craft - the parts of our work we are passionate about, the stuff that gets us “in the zone,” the things that we are truly talented at and want to spend our time on.

Next Up!

Stay tuned for more Intelligent Automation articles, including one where I explain how to automate the generation of AI-generated and SEO-optimized content outlines using Trello!

AND….

Share Your Most Tedious Task & Get Featured in a Future Newsletter!

💬 Comment or reply to let me know your #1 biggest time-suck of a tedious task, and I’ll include an Intelligent Automation (IA) solution for it in a future newsletter!