Automation is magic! Instead of wasting time on repetitive tasks and manual processes, automation tools can do the work for you. And the coolest part about automation is that it works in the background, day and night, on your behalf. This can lead to a lot of cost savings, but even more important, it can result in huge gains in team productivity of human workers that are now free to work on more creative tasks.
But despite this huge potential, there have been two main challenges that have been holding back the power of automation.
- It's too hard to set up. In traditional automation, an "automation engineer" would have to painstakingly configure each of the steps that needed to be automated, thoroughly test the automation, and then continuously update it.
- It's too limited in what it can do. Because automation technology has been historically rigid, it has been limited to routine tasks that are simple, and predictable.
Here's what's exciting: Artificial Intelligence (AI) is about to completely transform the nature of automation and make if a vastly more powerful technology for complex tasks.
In this article, I'll walk you through what I mean when I say "AI Automation", why I think it will be so valuable to so many people, and how to get started.
What kind of automation are we talking about?
The automation landscape is broad, ranging from robots assembling cars in factories (manufacturing automation) all the way to small scripts that can automatically click buttons on a web page (robotic process automation - or RPA).
In this article we're going to be talking about workflow automation that's built for repeated business processes, enabling users to automatically connect data and run actions across their apps. Zapier, Make.com, and Relay.app are commonly used tools in this category.
How will Artificial Intelligence transform automation?
AI is going to transform automation in two ways, which are directly tied to the two main challenges I mentioned above.
1) Intelligent automation will vastly expand the types of tasks that can be automated. As AI systems can now match certain classes of human intelligence, they can do way more than just copy data from one app to another. Large language models (LLM) and other machine learning (ML) techniques can now summarize, translate, understand, extract, edit, and draft information.
2) AI will make automation development vastly easier for all types of users - from technical employees at large companies to small business owners. Instead of having to learn complex programming languages, AI will let users create automations with a combination of natural language processing and simple automation builders that are accessible to anyone.
Practical automation examples with Artificial Intelligence
Finance
Modern machine learning models excel at information extraction - transforming unstructured data into structured data. For example, you can take a pdf of an invoice or an image of a receipt and automatically parse out the key information, like the amounts, due date, and status.
Here are examples of automation for finance professionals:
1. Extract information from an invoice and store it in a spreadsheet.
2. Scan a receipt image and store it in your finance tool.
3. Analyze a spreadsheet of previous expenses and predict future costs.
Marketing
Many of the repetitive tasks in marketing boil down to drafting, editing, and repurposing written content from social media teams to blog writers to advertising teams. And LLMs do this really, really well, in many cases better than human virtual assistants! Here are a few examples of AI-powered automations for content:
1. Add a content idea to a Notion database and automatically get a draft of a blog post.
2. Automatically copy-edit each blog post you write and align it with your style guide.
3. Draft social media posts automatically for each now blog post or video.
Sales
In sales above all, personalization is the key to great customer interactions from sending high-quality outreach in customer prospecting to building relationships through demos and discovery, every message needs to be carefully tuned to give the best customer experience. And again, LLMs are really good at this! They can take in historical examples of successful interactions, the previous context of a particular customer, and automatically perform many of the most common sales tasks. Here are some examples:
1. Create an automated meeting assistant that extracts information from notes and adds it to the CRM.
2. Automate lead qualification with AI classification.
3. Build customer relationships with personalized emails based on both original web research and previous interactions.
Conclusion: If You Want to Benefit from AI, Now is the Time and Automation is the Way
If you've played around with ChatGPT, you've seen how powerful artificial intelligence tools can be, and tools for automation can be the most practical way to get the benefits in your day-to-day business operations.
AI and automation pair together beautifully, and the best time to start building your automation systems is right now.
Audit where you're spending time across your digital tools, and build AI-powered automations for the most time consuming items. You'll be amazed by how your performance over time increases! And if you need an place to start, I really believe that Relay.app is the easiest way to start building these automations and we have a bunch of tutorials to get you started. Good luck and happy automating!
