Build Out Any Zapier Automation With This 3-Step Process (my framework as an automation expert)
Let's build with Zapier and AI (100+ videos)📅 2023-09-21
Transcript
[00:00] hey everyone welcome back to Corbin AI where I'm showing you how to start leveraging artificial intelligence in your personal or your business life now you click on today's video because you essentially want to know two major things the first thing you want to know is the thought process behind building an Automation and the second thing you want to know is how do I apply that so I can build any type of automation I want for my business and you can reuse this framework and this process and essentially really start building out complex flows by understanding these fundamental blocks so without further Ado let's go and jump in here
[00:30] essentially the first thing I want to do in this video is going to be a little bit more of showcasing potential of the automation platform a little bit more of you know drawing on a whiteboard and then the second half of this video I'm going to dive in and build out an example flow so the context of the flow that I'll be building out using this process live is going to be a flow essentially when we receive an email we're going to use gbt analysis to send it between different paths depending on what we want on the data we received on email so that make more sense later in the tutorial let's go ahead and start off though by
[01:01] fundamentally understanding what an automation is how to approach when you want to build out automation what to understand the building automation this is going to help you regardless of your skill level so whether you're a starter or an expert when it comes to zapier and just automation Platforms in general this kind of thought process is going to allow you to build out more complex flows and flows that you want to start integrating in your business because you're going to better understand intuitively the capabilities of what you need to understand about these flows so enough of me talking there let's go ahead and jump into the major thing that we need to understand essentially when
[01:31] building out flows is that's going to be our toolkit so what I mean by toolkit is beyond the apps that essentially integrate uh natively into zapier zapier has apps that are essentially built within zapier's backend so for example filters by zapper let me see if I can pull up the entire list here real quick okay so I got the entire list here essentially these are apps that obviously are built by zapier and aren't just like you know Facebook or Google ads like these are actually zapier apps and the reason I start off this tutorial like this is because this is your
[02:02] toolkit so this is essentially your wrench this is your Phillips screwdriver this is what essentially gives you the breadth of understanding what you're able to do within the platform past the functions of the apps that you plan on integrating so what do I mean by that a couple things first thing is that for example do you understand what a filter is in this context a filter can be used in a lot of different situations so to give one recently that we've integrated in our back end is we've added more fraud analysis so essentially anytime we incur transaction we go through a
[02:33] automation process that essentially uses a filter block and based off stuff we've already set up we have tags set up with our orders where essentially if it's been identified as a filter or it's been identified within that filter to essentially be fraud then we will continue the flow in a different you know route different paths in an email so on so forth down that process so filters or fundamental when trying to use more if else statements right so if you're familiar with coding you know what if else is so if these variables are true we're going to do this if these are not true we
[03:03] won't do this so this is very very useful formatting I'm sure you're familiar with this if you're familiar with this channel this is what essentially allows us and this is very important in the context of specifically Chad gbt and other contexts as well but this allows you to take outputs and when you receive data to essentially you know in the name format it whether you want to separate maybe a one big data block into multiple different data points whether you want to essentially remove special characters within a add data output that's fundamental to know
[03:34] schedule if you do a lot of stuff when it comes to you know every Sunday I need to do reports you know social media you know social media posting every Monday or every Tuesday I want to post something that's important delay this is what's going to give you the ability to essentially you know put delays on your flow so there's two use cases for this first use case is uh you know mimicking human responses in the context of AI Second Use case for this is sometimes in a flow there's going to be a process that might be happening outside so maybe you have two zapier flows occurring at the same
[04:05] time and one of the zapier flows requires data for this zapier flow but essentially the data takes a couple seconds to get received therefore we need to put a delay block of two minutes in order to that data gets received so that might sound really complex but as you start understanding more of this you'll start realizing you know how do I use a data or a delay block and why that delay block is so fundamental the next one is Code by zappy so look at code by zapier as your Universal tool that essentially in theory code by zapier could do all of these but these are just package nicer so code by zapier is that
[04:38] kind of extendo where essentially if there's a certain function that you're trying to do that these don't suffice you just can code it so that's that context looping this is a pretty complex one but pretty powerful one especially in the context of spreadsheets especially in the context of maybe instead of setting up 10 different zaps to you know digest some data we can set up one zap and then set up a looping function so you know actually repeat a certain amount of data manipulation you know 10 times five times so on so forth and the list kind of continues here I
[05:09] don't want to bore y'all by going through all this but the point is essentially is this is the first thing you really need to understand when it comes to can I build out any type of automation I want because what this does is this gives you a base level of essentially your understanding the capabilities that you have when it comes to building out automation so for example RSS feed podcast storage this is a huge one if you don't know what storage is I can store a data point from one zapier flow and I can call upon that data point in another zapier flow so a lot of this stuff you can check out my other videos here especially in a zapier
[05:39] for AI 5000 which will be at the end of this video you can kind of get more intuitively understanding these but this is the first step is understanding your toolbox so once you understand your toolbox so we can go kind of go like one here and we're going to exit this out here once you understand your toolbox now the next step is okay so I know what I can do outside of just the underlying software now the next step is you know understanding obviously before you know the step of what do I want to automate now the next step is understanding what software
[06:10] um I plan or have intentions of trying to automate so once you understand the software you try to automate the way to do that and do the fact that zapier integrates with so many softwares this should be pretty easy here um let's say for our example we plan on integrating today which is going to be Gmail okay so it integrates I would plan on integrating AI you know open AI so using you know zapier apps looking to go into the domain zapper.com apps you can see it does all my software integrate uh open Ai and then essentially you know
[06:41] maybe we'll throw Google Drive in there just to show some use case when it comes to grabbing files so Google Drive perfect another thing that zeppo does is it has a nice little you know organization of the type of apps now if that all being said you can integrate apps outside of zapier that won't be done in today's tutorial but we do go over that with web Hooks and understanding API requests for today's tutorial though we are just going to show you how to build out any automation which should still be applied to API requests but in the context of essentially natively integrated apps so now that we understand we have a toolbox
[07:11] we want to understand okay what software do you want is automation flow so in my specific context we want to basically analyze an email that's coming in and we want to send it down two different paths depending on the post analysis that we provide so I understand especially I might be using Gmail today I'm going to be using AI today and then maybe we'll throw on a Google drive there so we can just kind of show some file usage and stuff of this context so now that I understand the software I'm going to use in my flow I understand the toolbox understand the software The Next Step here is just you
[07:42] know let's build out the flow so let's go ahead and build out this flow so it's really that simple so if you know maybe you want to go and kind of refer to the bucket method here and I don't want to feel like I'm beating a dead horse here but I keep bringing this up but you know for new viewers of this channel that might not know what the bucket method is I'm gonna go ahead and just explain that real quick so then you can intuitively really start applying automation within your business or other businesses or clients businesses for that context and you know so a bucket method which maybe I should
[08:14] trademark by now um essentially the bucket method allows you to understand what you should automate so you have your business here or you have your uh let's say Biz operations and essentially we'll go ahead and just put it all in the cloud and then you got two buckets so you got the bucket that essentially is automation now this could be Automation in general context and some automation with AI in it and then we got manual work
[08:44] to write that out essentially the idea here is this we take our operations so we take the hour two three four five however long it takes you to do write it out put in a Google doc whatever it is every single thing associated with your business when I say everything I mean everything the manual text you're sending out the manual email the onboarding process the you know actually serving the client process you know building out the PDFs maybe for a lead feed everything entail of your business and once you've written
[09:15] that out on a Google doc and a whiteboard whatever that may be start analyzing it and saying what can I automate and what can I not automate now a lot of this you might have not enough discretion to understand can I truly automate this what I would say in the beginning is that if the entire process is either done through software just lean on the side that I could probably automate this now for manual task this might be certain stuff you can't automate or you need more discretion over and I give examples of financial task I give examples of you know maybe
[09:47] an employee you know analysis of their productivity there's certain levels of you know input that you could do with AI or you can do of AI because of lack of the ability to access the software that has to be manual but with that being said the bucket process you know we're filling up our bucket here filling up our bucket here maybe at the end of it you're like uh you know it's 50 50. so you realize that 50 of tasks that you do on a day-to-day basis is truly you have to have some input into it and that's just how it is in the context of how you operate your business you know I gotta
[10:19] bake the cookies someone's I mean unless you get a robot right but I gotta put the cookies if I'm a bakery I'm gonna put the cookies in the oven I can't automate that but there's stuff over here accounting and stuff of this in nature you know maybe spreadsheet data you know handling you know lead information so over here can be automated so now we got our bucket now we understand what we need to automate let's go ahead and jump over to zapier and using everything I just described here let's go and build out this flow with the context that essentially I'm maybe not too familiar with automation or I'm approaching this
[10:51] with not really understanding the capabilities of the softwares I want to automate so as you remember here we wanted to do Gmail we wanted to do open Ai and we're going to throw in Google Drive there just as a nice little sweetener so we can really just see some cool stuff and essentially and this is really bad handwriting I should probably be a doctor of this cursive but uh let's go ahead and jump in here and essentially the first step is this let's type in the app so I'm going to type in Gmail here and you could do this in the back end of Zap view as well and we scroll down here and essentially as you see here these are
[11:22] all the actions that natively integrate with Gmail so we can kind of look it over like this so knowing our specific use case here I can kind of search through it as you've already probably done through your whiteboard or Google doc cable I know what is going to be the trigger event what is going to be the event that essentially incurs everything else past that and the trigger event for me was going to be a new email so I know that's new email you have new labeled email new email matching search stuff of this nature but we know that okay so starting off here Gmail can handle this and then if you come down here I mean
[11:52] there's a ton of different stuff that Gmail can handle here but first step is understanding can it do it or can it do it and going from there so we understand it can do it for Gmail and then um you know go to open AI okay well what do you want to do with open AI we want to basically set up a prompt uh actually in this context we're using chat GPT so um you actually type this inch correct here so what do we want to do with Chad gbt okay we want to send a conversation because we wanted to easily take data there and let Channel gbt analyze it can it do it it can do it okay perfect and
[12:22] then maybe in the context of Google Drive we want to uh you know reply with an email that has a specific file attached to it so can I find a file can uh okay so I can there's a new file folder I don't want that so maybe it's an action okay let me go into here uh and I kind of look through here and essentially I'm basically looking okay so I can't find the file if I can find the file that means that I get a direct link to the file which means that I could utilize the data within that file in the automation so that's the kind of way you want to think about it
[12:52] all you gotta really know is that the probably the most important part of your automation when you're building it out is understanding what your trigger is as none of the stuff post trigger will incur will happen or will even you know go through the process unless that trigger happens so I think out of everything that requires probably the most intuitive thinking of like okay whatever I'm trying to accomplish here what would be the most the best case First Step here so there may be some context here where essentially maybe like 20 of it you need manual input but
[13:24] at some point in that work process that you're inputting there is some point within that word process that you can be like okay wait no let's set up when we're 20 in we've done this much work now let's set up the trigger where when this incurs then it handles the rest right and maybe not be able to do it from zero to 100 but maybe 20 and then the 80 is automated if that makes sense so knowing this let's go ahead and jump over to our zapier account here all these and a ton more are from our previous tutorials here so I'm gonna go ahead and create a new snap here and we're going to go ahead and just call it
[13:55] any zap and go from here now zapier does have this feature where essentially they use AI to give you suggestions but honestly it's not that effective especially if you don't know what you're doing or uh it's just not that effective because of the fact that it can lead you in the wrong direction it's almost like you know when you're going through YouTube and sometimes you go down a rabbit hole and you're just like how did I end up here you can do that with this um unless you know how to Proctor it correctly you know exactly the words to use in this I advise against using this
[14:25] for now as you know it's beta might get better in the future but for now it's not going to be effective and it could lead you in the wrong direction from now though we're going to set up a trigger here so as we know we are using Gmail for today's trigger we already looked we did research we understand that Gmail can handle new emails so we're gonna go ahead and do new email or we could do new email matching search so it's going to fine-tune it a little bit more which might be better in your use case so I'm going to go ahead and do my courses account here and I'm going to send a test email here and then we can further the automation okay so I went ahead and
[14:56] sent a fake email here so a lot of times when you have lead information or inquiry information there'll be some type of fixed text that you found within that email so typically one example this could be new customer message also there are ways to do it where you can analyze which had gbt but we won't be doing that in this tutorial but for now we know our fixed text when we get a lead for a specific inquiry is new customer message we'll use that in our zap your flow but on top of that as you see here we got a fake email here so we got hey I hope this email finds you well my name is John Doe I reside in one two three Elm
[15:26] Street I'm reaching out to inquire about lawn mowing services Milan has brought me one thousand square feet and it goes on provides a ton of information so maybe typically your information comes with a lead form uh that's a like Google form or some type of form you throw on a website however your information comes in we're going to be able to analyze it regardless and still build out a flow of this nature so let's go ahead and jump back over to zapier here we're going to hit continue here and let's say the search string is new customer message and then more specifically so we can get very specific here we're going to say inbox because it comes into our inbox let's wait inbox and then our subject
[15:59] line is going to be you know basically looking for any subject line that has new customer message I'm going to continue here and then we're going to hit test this trigger so testing triggers essentially is going to look for data that Associates with that so sometimes when you build up flows you're gonna have to send fake data in order to play with it and essentially build out your full collectory correctly so keep that in mind as you see here we got our faked out of here for that specific email that we just created here so we'll say continue with selected record the next thing we're going to do here is a chat DBT block so you would do whatever's next in your context so think of it intuitively
[16:31] okay so if I was gonna do this manually I would simply open up this email and then I would essentially based off me reading the email I would understand what direction it should go so for today's example we're going to basically base the path of where they should go based off the square footage of the lawn that should be mowed so if it's sub a thousand we're gonna go down a different path because we know that the in essentially that customer is going to pay less because they have less lawn to mow if it's uh above a thousand we're gonna essentially go down a different path because we know that customer maybe we have more likelihood to sell or
[17:02] upsell Services due to have them having a bigger property so knowing that we're going to use the Chad gbt block here you would use whatever in your context uh be the next step here so maybe in your context you don't even need to analyze it and you just want to send a template right away you would essentially you know set up a Gmail here maybe add a delay box it's not instant and go through that route so think of it of how I would approach it manually and then trying to translate that into automation so in this context we're going to go through the translation of me actually
[17:33] reading the email but we're gonna have chat gbt read the email and then analyze it for me so I don't have to go and read the email myself so maybe you can even set up the context here where essentially it reads the email and it gives me a warning not even a warning but like a notification like hey it seems like a really really engaged lead you should probably check out his email or not depending on how you want to approach it so for this video though we're going to approach in the context of you know the filter method so we're going to go ahead and do gpt4 here gbt4 allows for more comprehension you could
[18:03] use 3.5 it requires more proctoring but for this we're going to say uh based off this lead email we received or our lawn mowing company this is going to be our context blocks we're going to say context and we're gonna do company here oh shiza I'm gonna do a company here I'm going to say uh lead email so essentially because we have identified
[18:34] the variable points of lead emo here now we can reference it here so we're going to say lead email subject body in this context we want to give as much information as possible to chadbt so we can understand essentially what it's analyzing right so we're gonna do parenthesis here to make the data stay within the realm of the chat DBT block here we're going to put in our subject line here and then we're going to put in our body plane this gives essentially all the information that's found within that email which is nice even gives a footer and we're going to go ahead and say uh
[19:04] generate the following outputs do semicolon and essentially based on the contextual your contextual business you would know what data is important to you or typically what's what's important to you so for us as you saw here on this new customer message let me drag this over here we're going to say uh square feet let's copy this square feet of property and another thing to realize is when I outline it like this you know I can do Square free property and put the next variable point it's going to essentially assume that's how I want the structure
[19:37] of the output to be as well which isn't bad but if you want a different structure output then basically the way you provide what data you're requesting should be you know structured differently so I'm going to say square feet property phone uh we'll say address semicolon and you know basically anything that you would really care about so let's just say and you know one summarization one sentence summarization
[20:09] of this lead one sentence uh whoopsie one sentence summarization of this lead so essentially what's occurring here is this manually I mean it would have been a little bit tough too because you would have had it like you know maybe copy over the phone number copy over the address but manually if you think about it when you read that email you would have already been in your brain basically making a one sentence summarization two sentence summarizations late okay based off my past experience based off this okay I would probably describe this lead as Xyz
[20:41] let's let jbt do that so then we're going to do uh let's see if there's anything else we need to do I'm going to go ahead and just get the Apple here so make sure you use a memory key random 32 character string this allows for consistent outputs especially when scaling and dealing with a lot of data so we're going to test action here and let's see if we need to Proctor this a little bit further one thing I want to point out as well as you'll notice this is the you know basically everything that is being internalized by jdbt is right here this data right here and as you see here we got our output so it's going to be the content in this context it says square
[21:11] feet a thousand phone number Elm Street and you might be saying well this phone number's not correct but that's the one we provided up here if you remember so we already provided like a non-working phone number um and then essentially one sentence summary summarization of the lead is John Doe is interested in our lawn mowing services along with potential additional service such as fertilizing aeration and weeding for a thousand square feet property and is looking for information or availability and pricing in the best way to proceed okay so we got all this information and let's go ahead and show you a specific use case for that toolbox we had earlier so the
[21:42] next thing you might be asking yourself is great I got all this information but when you push it towards further blocks it's one big data point which isn't nice so let's use a formatter block here and we're going to use a formatted block because essentially you want to take this text so the event is do we want to manipulate time do you want to manipulate numbers you want to manipulate text or utilities we want to manipulate text and that's going to be the often use case when you like AI because all outputs are text and we're going to go ahead and just say split and splitting the text essentially allows us to take that output
[22:12] which would be this entire reply and we're going to split it and with a separator of new line so essentially now we can grab specific data points that are within that one big block of outputs and for the segment index we're going to say all as separate fields and this will make sense so as you see one data block here and there we go now we got uh four different data blocks each one associated with what we care about we've got the square feet property got the phone got the address and we got the one sentence summarization from here let's
[22:44] go ahead and set up our conditional statement that essentially tells us which flow we want to go down so that's going to be our filter block this is why understanding that toolbox is so fundamental when building any type of automation because this is you know this essentially allows you to basically Proctor it and really control how you want the automation to behave so from here it's gonna be very simple this one this is going to be essentially we're going to take the output here and this might be Sable contains
[23:14] I may need to have this so this is structured out where it's just the number let me see okay it looks like I probably should be incentivized to do that so what I'm going to do though is instead of going maybe the like the easier way which would be doing chat gbt um we're going to do another formatter block here and essentially the purpose of this format of block is because we set up that memory key earlier we know that every single time it does an output it's going to structure the output if I can go to the test real quick it's going to structure the output with this specific dictation square feet
[23:44] property so what we can do here is we can set up an event of text again we're going to continue again and we're going to go ahead and do replace and with replace essentially we're going to grab the formatted output which is going to be output 1 and we're going to say find that specific wordage and we're going to replace it with nothing so therefore we are just left with the number there we go now when we do this we can go ahead and graph the number and we're going to say based off this number if it is
[24:15] um actually what I realized is we don't want to do a filter we want to do another block that is basically multiple filters that allows you to do different flows and that multiple filter block is going to be paths so as the word kind of says essentially pass allows to go down different routes depending on the data of the previous route and how you structure it so for path a let's just say we are doing uh you know less than or less than a thousand SQ and then for path B we'll say more
[24:47] than a thousand uh SQ so essentially if you're familiar with code like I said earlier this is if else's so if it is less than a thousand we'll go down this path if it is more than a thousand we'll go down that path so in our specific context here we know that it's going to be more than a thousand or actually quite literally a thousand so maybe I should rename this to like equals to or is more than a thousand and then essentially from here we can set up our path rule so we'll do the exact same thing this is just multiple filter blocks so do the exact same thing we'll
[25:18] do the output a thousand and we'll say um is greater than so we're going to go to a number here greater than and then just so you know we don't run into any issues here we're going to say 999 and essentially any number that is greater than 999 um some German there is going to be uh you know going down this path as you see here we got a green check mark and we kind of proceed from here so we are getting closer to our end solution here so I'm going to throw in a Google drive here just because I want to show you something cool and I'm going to also
[25:49] throw in a Gmail block here because what is the end conversion or what is the end event we want to do let's just say we want to set up a draft email here and we're going to go ahead and say uh Google drive here and we're going to say maybe typically when an individual you know reaches out to our company we provide a lead file or some type of PDF we're going to say choose your account here where your courses and I'm gonna hit continue here and then essentially we're gonna be finding the file's name and majority of the time your file or your underlying name of your file is going to be fixed text right so we're going to go ahead and
[26:19] just attach this this was from a different tutorial this is an Apple's inks 2019 quarterly report really random I know uh but the file's name is Apple Inc and then essentially it's always nice to add a folder here so for us this is our courses account so we got a folder that is for the purpose of API access let me jump in there so we've got API access and what I mean by that is that if we come over to our drive here and essentially I click this down here and I hit share this essentially this drive can be
[26:50] accessed by any one of the link and this allows us to access it with the API so which is great so I'm going to hit continue here we're going to test this step and it should show up here as you see here we got that specific file here a lot of information don't worry about it I'm going to come over here I'm going to say create draft or create drafts reply what to say create draft for now when continue here continue here and essentially we are going to start grabbing data from what was said previously so let's just say our subject line we in theory could set up a gbt block for this but let's just say our subject line is going to be you know new lead is here
[27:23] and then we're gonna go to two and essentially this is going to be the from email so from email was this one our main account and then if I come down here we can change it from name and so on so forth for now though because we're setting it up as a draft I'm going to go ahead and grab the text that is the one sentence summarization so I can kind of give more context before I respond to that email and I know that maybe it's going down path uh you know the path of greater than a thousand square feet so I could even add this here so it was a thousand more context for me to look at and from here essentially you know you can add a
[27:54] signature and stuff of this nature we can add an attachment like I previously was stating here so we do file exist but not shown the reason exists but it doesn't show is because for some reason when zapier provides data like that they don't like showing the actual underline link or the information about it don't ask me there's ways to use code to Output it and we've shown that in other tutorials but from here I got to continue and actually go ahead and test this step and we should get a draft email here and there we go we got our draft email here with the one sentence summarization the attached PDF and this
[28:24] context could be a lead PDF the underlying subject line there's more information I could add here I could have made it automatic with a template stuff of this nature one thing I want to point out though is in order to use Gmail you're going to need a workspace account which is going to be around six dollars a month that gives you access to the ability to mess around with its API and do stuff like this but without further Ado now you've kind of understand intuitively what it takes to build out an automation flow in this context so we know first we have a toolbox we need to understand everything in that toolbox so we know what our
[28:55] capabilities even are if you approach an Automation and you only know two of the apps out of that toolbox you basically are trying to do an automation of your hands to hide behind your back because if you look be like behind me we have one two three three out of like the five six blocks so basically fifty percent of this automation was zapier like zapier apps that's huge and a lot of times when you're dealing with creating automations 50 to 40 of your automation is going to be zapier apps so that's stage one
[29:26] understand the toolbox understand how to use a toe box stage two to building out any automation is essentially understanding the software Incorporated in that Automation and you know that just comes from experience of doing it manually you do the audit you do the work manually you understand okay this gets called this gets called this gets called this gets called okay what's the next step Pastor The Next Step past that is understanding your trigger your trigger in that context maybe 20 percent 30 40 whatever so some automations you might be able to do completely automated
[29:57] but some automations you might want to have more discretion where essentially you put in that manual labor up to 20 and then the rest of the 80 gets triggered and essentially let the automation do the rest of the work whatever that may be is dependent on your business context and then finally just building it out and as I said before the best way to really look at it is if you've done it manually or do it manually just take into account what is incurring through that process and one great example of that was that one sentence summarization that's something that happens subconsciously that you might
[30:27] not even realize you're doing but you can have ai do it now you know when you read an email and you get some type of like positive or negative feeling about it a I can do that now so this is pretty cool stuff here I wanted to show this real quick because I think there's a lot of need you can check out the playlist at the end of this video make sure to leave a like uh if you found value in this video playlist at the end of this video is gonna be the 5000 apps one I was talking about in this video um I want to show this though because a lot of tutorials are very niched down and very specific and does it kind of give you comprehensive like idea of the
[30:57] general idea behind automation so now you have that idea you should be better suited to build out any automation you want but without further Ado I'll see you in the next video thanks for tuning in and yes surprise I'm an AI Avatar make sure to explore more here at Corbin AI where we demystify AI for your personal and business life until next time