Zapier's Canvas: Visual Tool For Workflow Design & Ecosystem Navigation | Tutorial
Let's build with Zapier and AI (100+ videos)📅 2023-10-07
Transcript
[00:00] welcome back to Corbin AI where I'm showing you daily how to start leveraging artificial intelligence in your personal and your business life today's video we're going to be looking at a new feature that just came out on zapier it's called canvas and essentially this is part of the Early Access beta program I'm going to go and Link that in the description down below you can goad and join that so you can get on the wait list as well we're going to go ahead and dive into everything that's encompassed with canvas essentially what the end goal I think is with canvas and why the zap your team created this product and connect all the dots and see how we can start leveraging it in our automations so I must say out of all the new Fe that coming out every
[00:31] single one is super cool but this one takes the cake as this one's essentially connecting their entire ecosystem into a very uif friendly matter what I mean by that is that as we know we are seeing new ecosystems emerge with zapier with zapier tables interfaces and then of course the uh great old zaps the original shabam the automations that created this platform and essentially canvas is kind of taking the cake here where we're combining it all and we're seeing it visually better so just right off the bat before we even dive into canvas I want to point out as there is a
[01:03] lot of other automation platforms that compete and I've done videos comparing the two and showing you you know why you would choose zapier why you would choose make why you would choose pipe dream I got to say zapier's just leap years ahead of all these other platforms now they are truly taking this to the next level when it comes to it's coming it's going past automations now a lot of the processes you're about to see right now I could use in our business in the context of SAS platforms and a ton of other platforms but without further ad let's jump into canvas and essentially what this does is it creates a user
[01:34] interface and allows us to see all the different uh elements in zapier's ecosystem in a very friendly way so let's go ahead and just build out one together and see what we can do with it so I'm going to go ahead and just rename this up here to test canvas and as we see here we got a bunch of different options this kind of looks similar to the visual UI that we saw with the new zappier visual editor but but you know we got our zoom in zoom out um you know hide summary show summary fit to view so we get right up to it if
[02:06] you have a trackpad you can scroll in and out here we got our different tools or different functions drag and drop platform right here and then you know we got different stuff we can add here such as you know click options to add a description actors people and groups involved displayed here and apps and software is reference to be displayed here and what's even cooler is they even integrated some AI here with some recommendations so we're going to see if that's useful in this context but for now let's just go ahead and build out a very simple flow here where maybe it's a lead form we combine some Gmail we combine some you know outputs and kind
[02:36] of try to combine interfaces tables and automations all into one all right so we're going to go ahead and add a step here and as you see here we got a step involving a person or group or automated and then we can go ahead and title the step here we can provide actors so maybe individuals within your team at your business and then the apps that we could choose here is either tables or interfaces and then of course you know we we got a great automation now what's amazing right off the bat is that if you're familiar with this channel we talk about essentially how some processes within your business no matter
[03:07] how much you automate there is going to be manual discretion involved and they even have that here as an option where default is manual discretion so that's already super cool uh in this context though we're going to go ahead and start with an interface block here and we're going to go ahead and do the purpose of lead form submitted so then from here we can choose our different lead forms for us we go ahead and just go with web Cafe leads and then it'll bring up that specific page we created on web Cafe leads and we'll probably go do sign up
[03:37] here and as you'll see we can edit that specific page on interfaces I wanted to so I can jump over to interfaces and we'll have all the information provided here from the sign up to the thank you and then you can kind of go into that we go into a more in- depth tutorial interfac you can check that out here on our Channel but if I come back here I'm going to go ahead and say okay and going to hit this little plus sign we're going to go ahead and say add step here and what's even cooler is they even have the option of adding bullings or true false statements or yes no statements so essentially we can decide to go down different paths depending on the input that we receive from the previous data
[04:08] block for now though we're going to go ahead and just say add step here and then it kind of gives us the same UI here so as you'll see we start filling out this on the top left here and essentially from here we can kind of just build out and really connect zapier's entire ecosystem so I'm going to go ahead and find the zap that is associated with this lead form real quick so as you see here essentially this is the zap we created here so we currently have it set up where when someone submits a submission through this lead form on interfaces we're going to send ourselves an email to give us a
[04:39] notification that hey you know someone just completed this underlying form here so if I come over here and go ahead and do automated search for the zap here new lead form interface and then hit continue here and it provides even shows UI wise what the steps that are occurring here and then essentially from here as you see here we can go and hide steps and let see see if there there's no I'm actually curious to see what it says for get recommendations okay so interesting so essentially it's similar to the current automation I have but it wants to essentially grab more details from the
[05:09] lead form um there's an improved recommendation create this app and this is really cool I mean this is Alpha so we're just getting started here this really shows you essentially you know longterm where this is going so let's say the next thing I want to do here is I want to add a step here and I want to integrate tables with tables I can go ahead and put in web Cafe lead form and essentially from here I can visualize uh we can say um lead data and then you know we can keep that as the same here and from here you know doesn't really
[05:40] matter if it's automated or not you just defaults involving a person guess I could put automated actually just leave that default because we're doing the zap your tables here and as you see here now we have visualized the underlying process that's incurring here so we receive a lead Let Me Go a and zoom in here we receive a lead uh the lead gets automatically sent to our email and then on top of that the leads data from this form is put into our table now as you see here this bottom part right here allows us to drag in interfaces drag in tables uh drag in zaps and split paths
[06:13] so split paths you know is basically uh depending on what happens before what should we do in that context say the one of the data points was essentially uh business size and then we can go ahead and do path one you know maybe it was was under 10 and then this one was over uh 20 or something like that essentially if it's under 10 we would proceed with this steps if it's below uh over 20 we would proceed with this steps in the automation flow you know this is
[06:45] really cool and the reason this is really cool and and I'm already my the wheels are kind of turning in my head right now is essentially as this ecos system gets more fleshed out as obviously the tables interfaces and now this you can can really start visualizing complex backend flows that incur within your business um at a very very simple UI level I mean the the stuff that's incurring here is it just really shows you and I remember uh when I watched some of the videos from zap connect one of the uh speakers
[07:17] was talking about essentially they were trying to build out a uh basically be a full stack engineer in like 2010 and buil out an entire SAS uh and raw coded essentially and essentially what they're doing here is that they're giving people the ability to really build out you know stuff that like 5 six years ago would have required a ton of code a ton of cost and you know really show you how to visualize it now so the main use case I see for canvas right here is when you
[07:48] really start leveraging automation when you really start understanding how to connect the dots it's going to be an absolute power machine because in theory this can get very complex and you don't have to get overwhelmed anymore because it seems like canvas is going to give us the ability to really you know I could sit down here and let's say uh you know I have a contact form uh on my SAS platform and they fill it out now what I can do is I can really build out the entire flow really Branch it out and give me more context of how it should proceed essentially and even has share
[08:20] up here so that's interesting um let me see what this can do so we can download the PNG that's super cool uh you can change the name here and we can share with anyone at personal access okay that's that's super cool as well I mean imagine you're building out a automation for a client and the and the client required you to use interfaces tables and automations and now you can send and share the underlying automation through canvas so let's see what we got else
[08:51] here got options okay same thing same deal um and then we got recommendations over here and um you know some other options for tools selection I mean this is all Alpha but I definitely see where they're going with this this is very much long-term game here they are going to absolutely dominate the market when it comes to this Niche because of the fact that now we're kind of moving past automations and we're making it where we're building out an entire ecosystem on zapier's back end U that being said if they had a public stock I would totally invest in it um but without
[09:22] further Ado uh if you found value in today's video make sure to like the video it's completely free if you like this kind of content you want to see more content on on this topic you can check out the playlist at the end of this I'm going to link the one that talks about AI tools and business and essentially shows you different automation tools different AI tools you can start leveraging give you more context and all this stuff I think this right here is a step in the right direction as one it's going to be very useful in the context of selling services to businesses but also very useful in the context of you know really allowing you to instead of draw this on
[09:52] a whiteboard like an actual physical whiteboard now I can actually use their UI and basically build out an entire flow uh of what I want to achieve so this is a very powerful tool in that context plus it's going to be this is Alpha so I can't even imagine what the production level is going to be 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
[10:22] business life until next time