5 Ai and automation methods you can apply today to boost productivity - Beginner friendly
These methods can drastically free up capacity and time for you, with no development or specialized AI knowledge needed. This is a beginner friendly way to automate some your most boring, repetitive tasks that eat your time.
1. Create a customized AI that understands your role, challenges, everyday work, and the tools you use.
You can use ChatGPT to create a custom GPT, or Claude Projects to develop a personalized AI assistant. Instruct it to be your assistant, and provide it with everything it should know about your work, goals, and everyday tasks. Be sure to list the tools you use, describe the challenges you face, and detail the tasks that consume most of your time, especially any repetitive manual tasks. Direct your assistant to be an expert in fields you can benefit from, to advise you, challenge you, and provide practical, actionable support.
For example, let's say you're a sales manager with responsibilities like employee meetings, team meetings, nurturing high-ticket clients, doing tenders, and keeping track of costs and activities. When a custom AI knows all these responsibilities, it can quickly analyze documents and data, create summaries, reports, or tables, advise you on better methods or tools to complete tasks more efficiently, help you draft sales pitches or emails, and brainstorm creative ways to attract more leads or upsell existing clients.
2. Automate workflows with Zapier
It's nearly impossible to discuss everyday digital automation without mentioning Zapier. With pre-set integrations for the APIs of thousands of apps, including those most of us use daily like Google Drive, Gmail and all Google apps, social media channels, CRM systems, Slack, sales systems, and AI tools from OpenAI, Anthropic, and others, Zapier makes it possible to analyze, transform, or perform other tasks with the information flowing between the apps. With just a few clicks, you can set up workflows to send alerts to your email when certain events occur in Slack or your CRM, auto-respond to emails or messages, create or update documents as new entries come in from another app, and draft copy, outreach emails, reports, or other written content based on triggers from another app.
3. Use an AI as a digital/tech support.
While it's good to try solving problems yourself before asking an AI (to maintain self-confidence, trust, and mental acuity), there are many boring tasks we do regularly that needlessly consume our limited time. For administrative, manual, repetitive work, screenshot your tools and processes, feed the images to an intelligent LLM model like Claude 3.5, and ask how you can make it more efficient. Or ask Perlexity, which can perform live online research for you and find the newest solutions to help you.
4. Use an AI agent.
This is a slightly more advanced step, but the great advantage of agents compared to custom chatbots like GPTs is that they can perform actual tasks on command. They can access the apps you use and perform actions like writing and sending emails, summarizing articles or webpages to your Google Docs, creating tables in your Google Sheets, publishing or scheduling social media posts, checking your Slack or inbox, etc. You can also set this up in Zapier Central. Compared to automated workflows, which are directed to perform certain tasks based on certain triggers, agents can flexibly perform actions on your command using whichever apps they have permissions and account access for.
5. Use plug-and-play chatbots for customers and visitors.
Today, there are plenty of affordable, user-friendly solutions that allow you to train a chatbot and integrate it to your website or commercial products. These chatbots can be trained on your website or software to respond to visitors' or users' questions. They provide answers to FAQs, direct users to the right persons, respond to questions, and enhance the user experience. They can also log questions as support tickets, gather feedback, or collect leads efficiently, freeing up time for customer service. Internally, you can use the same type of solutions to answer new employees' questions about your role or team, or serve as a general knowledge base for employees.
Need help to get started with any of these methods or more advanced solutions? Get in touch to learn how I might help you.
