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воскресенье, 24 мая 2026 г.

How are AI Agents Redefining Sales and Marketing

 


Can you imagine a world where your sales never miss a beat, your marketing campaigns are always on point with your customers, and your business thrives on data-driven insights? Well, don’t just imagine, with the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) you can make this happen with accuracy and efficiency. AI Agents in Sales and Marketing are evolving with the development of better customer involvement and higher conversion rates. AI is more than automation and virtual assistants, it can transform your future where every interaction is tailored to an individual’s needs.

In the present fast-paced world, the attention span is shrinking, and information overloading, making it even more important for businesses to focus on data-driven campaigns and offer values that resonate with existing customers and attract new ones. This blog will help you understand what AI Agents for Sales and Marketing are, how they enhance the traditional ways of sales and marketing, and how to use AI in sales.

What are AI Agents and What Do They Do?

AI Agents are intelligent software programs designed to automate and enhance tasks in sales and marketing particularly relevant for Gen AI in sales. They leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze data, learn from patterns, and make decisions, ultimately improving efficiency and effectiveness which is crucial. AI gives insights they’d miss otherwise to 73% of consumers and dealers. 

Think of AI Agents in marketing as your virtual assistants, working tirelessly behind the scenes to streamline your processes and handle repetitive tasks like scheduling appointments, sending emails, and qualifying leads. In particular, AI SDR (Sales Development Representative) agents can elevate the early stages of customer engagement by automating lead qualification and outreach, ensuring that potential clients are properly identified and engaged.

AI agents’ examples go beyond simple automation. They can also help you to manage the complexities of and ensure a smooth launch. For example, they can automate outreach to potential investors, analyze market trends to identify ideal launch timing and personalize communication to maximize engagement. By leveraging AI in sales, you can streamline your sales process, optimize your marketing efforts, and increase your chances of success. 

Role of AI Agents in Sales and Marketing


The relationship managers between consumers and businesses are becoming more associated with the touch of AI agents, which are prominent assets to artificial intelligence and sales. Essentially, AI use cases and applications show these agents play a complex role in today’s sales and marketing industries.

1. Enhanced Personalization

AI for startups can analyze a large turnover of consumer information such as; their demographic data, interconnect internet usage, and past orders. Since they can collect information about the customers, they can advise how to work and sell their products to every customer uniquely. Imagine how such a Generative AI in E-Commerce can benefit the overall relevancy and efficiency of a campaign by creating a stream of emails with products that correspond to the client’s purchase history.

2. Streamlined Sales Automation

For sales AI agents can be used to drive many of those time-wasting activities such as appointment making, follow-up e-mails, and even the qualification of prospects. AI SDR agents fit naturally here by automating early-stage outreach and lead qualification, which gives the human salespeople more time to dedicate their time in brewing relationships, closing the sales, and coming up with more projects such as projects. This makes it gives the human salespeople more time to dedicate their time in brewing relationships, closing the sales, and coming up with more projects such as projects. Organizations can also manage the marketing AI agent because options for cost savings are nearly endless in terms of automation.

3. Better Lead Scoring and Generation

The field of Cognitive Sciences can engage web and consumer data to detail possible customers with buying intentions. The qualified prospects are thus eagerly out there waiting to be contacted by the salespeople to enhance the chances of converting these leads into customers. By this marketing, AI agent makes it possible to get the right messenger to the most probable leads with the help of this efficient lead-scoring system to support outreach.

4. Data-Driven Insights and Forecasting

Another AI agent use cases is in the aspects of data analysis especially when dealing with large chunks of data to look for, patterns and trends beyond the reach of human perception and with the help of given data, be in a position to predict what will be ahead. This makes it possible for firms to invest in the right locations and channels, coordinate and develop the proper type of campaigns, and sometimes even concoct new products from information.

Benefits of AI Agents in Sales and Marketing

What directly pertains to business organizations is that such abilities of AI Agents for Sales and Marketing, which challenge business houses to huge strides are possibly the most fulfilling when explored. This is an insightful look at how agents AI helps sales and marketing teams:

Improved Targeting and Customer Insights:

  • They enable better targeting and a better understanding of the customer.
  • There is another area where artificial intelligence is very effective; it is for the examination of the clients’ larger data, their demographic data, past purchase data, World Wide Web use social media account data, etc.
  • With these realizations, marketers might design potent advertisements that have the motivation of pro-trial sentiments within particular client segments.
  • It can also translate to organizations ensuring that IOTs do not fail in meeting the client’s needs and wants because there are solutions available informing the clients what IOTs can offer.

Tailored Customer Experiences

  • Information and content are personalized, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) modifies the given choice and proposal.
  • This enhances the results of the relationship that the firm has with its clients as well as customer loyalty ultimately enhancing sales conversion rates.
  • The main stand of fortune of chatbots is the round-the-clock customer service and immediate personal response.

Simplified Procedures for Sales

  • Thus, AI frees the sales representatives’ time to engage in more productive activities instead of spending their time on lead scoring, lead qualification, and appointment scheduling.
  • More benefits can also be seen in the use of the AI sales intelligence system by the brokers since it provides information on the prospect and competitors.
  • This in turn will have higher possibilities of sale production and can also identify predictive difficulties before altering the revenue techniques.

Large-Scale Content Creation

  • By applying the Artificial Intelligence technique, firms would be confident that the messages that they post through the blogging websites, the interaction through social sites, and even on any products’ descriptions are identical.
  • This one may be favorable for the search engines and the generation of leads for a target client thus boosting site traffic.

Advantage of Competition

  • Introducing AI into the strategic management system enables an organization to have an edge over a rival in business deals.
  • Therefore, adopting AI in the areas of marketing and sales leads to coming up with more potential customers, more chances of developing conversion rates, and enhanced relationships between the business and the customer.

In addition to the benefits, nearly 6 in 10 users believe they are on their way to mastering the technology. The importance of AI Agents in Sales provides and AI marketing agent insights to 34% of salespeople and helps 31% of sales reps write sales messaging.

Examples of AI Agents in Sales and Marketing

AI for startups is transforming sales and marketing through various means such as automating tasks, analyzing data, and personalizing interactions. Here are a few examples of AI agents in sales and marketing:

1. Chatbots

The latter is to greet the users of particular websites, answer their questions or inquiries, and filter leads 24/7. Also, they can schedule demos, make suggestions on what product they think the client should purchase, and handle simple sales.

2. Intelligent Content Engines

Targeted advertising involves the use of the user’s information and the pattern at which he or she surfs the internet to modify emails, social media posts, and web content. Due to this, customers shall be exposed to content that is relevant to them hence improving interaction.

3. Lead Prioritization and Scoring

This means that AI assesses talk sequences regarding prospects and assigns them a score based on their ability to sell. By focusing on strong leads, a sales representative can increase their productivity and impact positively on the system.

4. Market Trend Prediction

 AI involves a massive amount of data processing and utilizes it in the prediction of the consumers’ behavior and development of the market. This also makes marketers future-ready and prepares them for change, they can predict the market and its demands to alter marketing efforts.

Importance of AI Agents in Sales and Marketing

Independent intelligent agents are a major force that is revolutionizing the methods of selling and marketing, speaking of agent artificial intelligence is no longer a fantasy. Here are the reasons behind the Importance of AI Agents in Sales and marketing AI agent:

1. Enhancing Human Capabilities: Currently, managers will hire AI developers to assist with the sales and marketing duties but they won’t replace the sales and marketing personnel. Instead, it is just smart helpers that automate some of the tedious work and provide immediate information. This makes human knowledge for doing business, relationship creation, and contract closure and thinking available.

2. Unlocking the Power of Personalization: Consumers require tangible personalization in the current age of big data. AI agents can therefore generate highly specific content, recommended services/products, and promotional messages based on the client’s behavior and past choices. Such laser-like focus is well appreciated by customers, improving the relations and boosting the actual conversions.

3. Predicting Customer Needs: The application of AI in sales and marketing gives those departments a type of ‘ peek’ into the future. Here, AI can predict what the consumers would want, and what they are most likely to purchase, forecasted from records and trend analysis of sales. This makes companies to be a step ahead ensuring they offer the right service to customers at the right time.

4. Encouraging Constant Customer Engagement: Customers Shift The rigid work schedules or what used to be called a 9-5 working week do not exist again. AI bots can provide support 24/7 and answer questions. This way client satisfaction and hence loyalty are achieved since a client gets the required information at the right time.

5. Optimal Resource Allocation: To say this, AI is beneficial for work on sales and marketing for employees as it makes this work more intelligent rather than increasing the load. AI optimizes everyone’s resource utilization since it provides accurate data and minimizes the amount of manual labor. He has put much effort into elaborating how teams can work to guarantee that they get the most out of their investment resources, specifically by focusing more on activities that produce a big impact.

Sales and Marketing in the Future with AI

One can therefore be very sure that the increasing development and integration of AI Agents in Sales and Marketing will greatly affect sales and marketing in the future. Thus, as AI technology continues to improve,  we may expect to have even more sophisticated features that intertwine the relationship between humans and machines. Chatbots will evolve into comprehensive communicational companions that understand complex questions and respond accordingly. AI agent use case engines shall become even more anticipatory to envision the clients’ needs before they are identified. These frictionless consumer journey maps to be generated from this hyper-personalization will make customers happier they will buy like never before. These frictionless consumer journey maps to be generated from this hyper-personalization will make customers happier they will buy like never before.

AI use cases and applications will shift the traditional marketing and sales team to that of a consultation agency. For marketing, AI agents will give strategic insights into the consumers’ attitudes, competitors’ expectations, and market expectations, by analyzing large volumes of data in real time. In turn, the teams will be more prepared to adapt campaigns toward better performance, use data to their advantage, and stay relevant to occurrences. Sales and marketing is a field that will see a beautiful dance between AI’s unsurpassed analytical prowess and human hard-won knowledge shortly hence a level of consumer interaction that could barely be imagined.

The Final Word

It has to be recognized that AI Agents in Sales and Marketing are currently redefining the historical concept of ‘consumer connection’ at its most basic levels. It is possible to expect the day when intelligent automation delivers seamless, personalized, intelligent client experiences due to the existing AI advancements. Companies have huge opportunities in the future to grow sustainably, spike up their sales, and align more with their customers.

However, the factors that are required for the implementation of AI are the skill and the right approach. can help companies unleash their potential with the help of AI. Given the fact that they possess innovative strategies in developing applications that tackle key concerns, intending and committed consumers can seek the aid of an AI agent development company or hire an AI developer like SoluLab to comprehend the potential of the extensive area of application entailing AI in sales and marketing.

FAQs

1. What are the major advantages of using AI agents in marketing and sales functions?

The benefits that come with the use of AI agents include; persistent customer interaction, personalization of clients’ experiences, removal of monotonous tasks, insights, and increased efficiency for the marketing and selling teams.

2. How might the customer come across these AI agents’ presence and how might the agents adapt the experience?

One of the most important advantages is the possibility to adapt the information, the recommendation as well as the marketing and sale messages according to the client’s preferences and even behavioral characteristics that have been collected regarding him/ her. Due to the unique customer focus this creates, the level of engagement and possible conversions rises.

3. Will we see bots that will work more like real marketers and real salespeople?

AI bots are in no way intended to replace human experts. Instead, they are intelligent assistants, sparing the true knowledge for deal-making, relationship-closing, and strategic thinking.

4. What must be considered when using AI agents?

Note that structured and clean data is critical in successfully feeding it to the AI algorithms Integrating AI could lead to certain distortions to the existing organizational processes. Thus, there ought to be guidelines that companies must adhere to about the safeguarding of the identity and rights of their clients, especially in AI selection and operation.

5. How can SoluLab help firms that want to utilize AI for marketing and selling?

We can help define the demands and then recommend the right instruments. The data should not be created through integrating AI. The main benefit that can be mentioned here is that current CRM, marketing automation, as well as other company systems, can be integrated into the new system with the help of solutions providers.

Shipra Garg

https://tinyurl.com/j99z268m


Fitting Agents into the Sales and Marketing Mix


Much has been written recently about how marketing and sales processes change when human buyers and sellers are replaced by buyer and seller agents: abbreviated, inevitably, as “A2A” marketing. It’s a fascinating topic but just one model that will coexist in the near future with human (or, more precisely, non-agentic) buyers interacting with agentic sellers, agentic buyers interacting with human sellers, and, lest we forget, humans interacting with humans. Any consultant will immediately recognize that this cries out for a 2x2 matrix, or perhaps a pair of 2x2 matrices if you want to distinguish business marketing from consumer marketing. For the moment, let’s stick with the single matrix model:



It’s worth making these admittedly-obvious distinctions because each situation raises separate issues, which are otherwise easily jumbled into a confusing heap. Let’s look at each situation in turn.

Human to Human (H2H)

Beyond the literal situation of one seller talking to one buyer, I’d argue this also includes humans interacting with traditional broadcast media, web search, and even non-agent websites. The common thread is that the human buyer does most of the work of asking questions and processing answers. The seller is largely reactive, although there are some situations where she makes choices such as selecting a personalized “next best action”, embedding dynamic content in a website, and setting up conventional search engine optimization. Those choices may be informed by predictive models or some other type of AI, but every step in the workflow is ultimately managed by humans, not agents.

I can’t point to specific data but am pretty sure that H2H interactions still account for the vast majority of today’s sales and marketing activity. This means that marketing and sales teams should still give significant amounts of attention to improving them, even though agentic interactions are vastly more fun to think about. If you absolutely must bring AI and agents into the picture, you can use them behind the scenes to speed up workflows, optimize performance, and analyze results.

Agentic Buyers to Human Sellers (A2H)

This is probably the situation that gets the most attention today. It includes true “buyer agents” (controlled directly by buyers) and “buyer-supporting” agents such as AI search engines and browsers. I call these “buyer-supporting” because they’re not controlled by the buyer, but instead by a company like OpenAI or Google which provides them to buyers at little or no cost.

The distinction matters because companies that offer “buyer-supporting” agents have their own agendas, which don’t necessarily align with the interests of actual buyers. In particular, these companies are increasingly interested in monetizing their products by serving ads within AI search and browser results. Some of these ads will be clearly labeled while others may be subtly embedded in the results themselves. These ads are an opportunity for marketers but may be problematic for users, who could be led to question the objectivity of the AI results.

Concern about biased AI search results could in turn lead to significant interest in true “buyer agents” that consumers pay for themselves. History suggests this will be an uphill battle: as we’ve seen with streaming video, large majorities of consumers typically chose free, ad-supported services over paid, ad-free subscriptions. Still, as streaming video has also shown, a significant fraction of consumers will pay for subscriptions in return for a better experience. This could be a large enough market to support a profitable business. Business buyers are even more likely to purchase agent subscriptions, since they don’t pay with their own money and can easily justify the expense based on better quality results. The precedent here is ad-supported versions of office productivity apps, which have never been broadly successful. There’s a chance that agents could be funded by charging advertisers for access to their owners, although such models have also failed in the past.

Advertising aside, most A2H discussions in martech and adtech circles focus on how sellers can adapt their systems to get the best results from buyer-side agents. This often involves advice on optimizing website design to accommodate search and browser agents, so a given brand receives the best possible treatment. Traditional SEO vendors are frantically expanding their products to meet this need and new AEO (AI Engine Optimization) specialists are also appearing. So far, the solutions are pretty basic: systems run sample queries to measure how often a given brand is mentioned in AI search results and vendors offer design tips to expose the kinds of data that AI agents are looking for. The next level is to look beyond measuring and influencing whether the brand is presented, to how it’s presented in terms of positioning and value. We’ll surely see more of that.

The thing to remember about “buyer-supporting” AI search and browser agents is they are generally driven by a big LLM model that draws from the same information for all users. True “buyer agents” would supplement the more-or-less static LLM models with custom research that visits seller websites to find answers to buyers’ specific questions. For example, one buyer might be interested in pricing details while another cares more about product quality. Beyond exposing all possible information, a seller might aim to present its product differently depending on what appear to be the buyer’s priorities. This is largely similar to today’s (non-agentic) website personalization. What’s more intriguing is the possibility that sellers can find a way to identify individual buyers’ agents over time, perhaps by requiring registration in exchange for detailed information. This would let the seller build a buyer profile and tailor responses to this profile. Piercing the buyer agents’ veil of anonymity would be hugely valuable.

There is a third situation: where the “H” in “A2H” is an actual human, not a non-agentic system. One current example is humans responding to agent-generated Requests for Proposals, which will likely be joined by other formats such as email inquiries or even telephone surveys. The growing volume of agent-generated requests is already a nightmare for business sellers faced with the cost of responding to them. The obvious solution is to let seller agents respond to the buyer agents, but it may be a while before most firms can deploy this capability. In the interim, sellers will be increasingly pressed to qualify buyers before deciding how to respond. Insofar as responding to qualification questions requires effort by the buyer, this imposes a cost on the buyer that should help to eliminate frivolous requests. At some point it might make sense for sellers to impose a literal cost – that is, to charge a fee – for responding to agent-generated sales queries. A less obvious concern is that buyers who rely on agent-generated research questions may fail to understand their true needs, removing a substantial portion of the value gained from a good purchasing project.

Human Buyers to Agentic Sellers (H2A)

Traditional websites may use AI-driven personalization but they are still non-agentic systems. In the future, we can expect true agentic interactions to become increasingly common. The best current example would be chat interfaces connected to an agentic back-end, enabling them to engage in true conversations with potential buyers. These have already evolved in some situations to full-scale agentic business development reps (who send those those super-annoying emails complementing your latest blog post and asking for an appointment) and sales reps (engaging in lengthy dialogs). Agentic customer support reps are even more common and, often, better than humans at many tasks. While the distinction between AI-based and agent-based interactions can be vague, it’s fair to say that agentic interactions will be significantly more responsive to individual situations. This, in turn, makes them more reliant on capturing real-time data, both for customer behaviors and surrounding context.

Letting autonomous agents interact directly with customers raises major concerns about governance, output quality, and risk. These are widely recognized, as are the challenges of integrating agent-based systems with existing infrastructure. That being the case, I won’t rehash them here, apart from noting that they currently present substantial barriers to adoption of H2A models.

Agentic Buyers to Agentic Sellers (A2A)

Agents selling to other agents is the obvious endpoint of agentic adoption. It’s appealing if only for the amusing prospect of agents merrily jabbering with each other without any human involvement. But apart from a few highly structured interactions, such as programmatic advertising, it’s still largely in the future. A2A can’t become more common until the industry first solves the separate challenges of agentic buyers and agentic sellers. It must then overcome the additional challenges of connecting the two. Once the plumbing issues are addressed, there will be another level of adoption as buyers and sellers work to turn the interactions to their advantage. How will price negotiations work when buyers want the lowest price possible and sellers want the highest price? How will sellers discover the actual needs of buyers so they can make the best recommendations – and is what’s best for the seller necessarily what’s best for the buyer? How will seller agents decide which information to offer and which to exclude? How will agents build trust with each other? And how will companies manage the computing costs of agent-to-agent interactions, which could be substantial if the interactions are extensive?

Plenty of smart people are surely working through these issues. We already see some technical foundations being laid in protocols such as MCP and Google’s A2A. But it’s probably too soon for most marketers to put much energy into worrying about A2A deployment. Mastering the intermediate steps of A2H and H2A should come first and will put them in a better position to deal with A2A when the time is right.

Summary

The impact of AI in general, and agentic AI in particular, is overwhelming. While this piece offers some ideas and makes some prediction, my real goal is much simpler: to suggest that distinguishing the different types of human and agent interactions is a way to split the topic into smaller, more tractable pieces. I hope that helps.


https://tinyurl.com/35dhd32b

AI agents fit into the sales and marketing mix as autonomous orchestrators that bridge the gap between marketing automation and human strategic execution. Unlike traditional software that requires human commands for every step, AI agents use reasoning and multi-step workflows to act, decide, and optimize campaigns or sales pipelines independently.

The Evolution: Automation vs. Agentic Capability

Understanding how AI agents shift your operations requires looking at how they differ from older tools:

  • Traditional Automation: Operates on strict "if-this-then-that" rules (e.g., sending a canned email exactly 3 days after a download).
  • Agentic AI: Operates on goals (e.g., "Find the decision-maker, research their current pain points, and qualify whether they match our ideal profile"). It reviews data, changes its tactics based on real-time feedback, and updates databases autonomously.

Mapping AI Agents to the Funnel

AI agents do not replace your sales and marketing teams; instead, they shift your staff into roles focused on strategy, brand integrity, and high-value relationship building.

1. Top of the Funnel (Marketing & Demand Gen)

  • Hyper-Personalized Campaign Execution: Agents dynamically tailor ad copy, visual variations, and email messaging for individual prospects based on real-time behavioral signals.
  • Smart Budget Reallocation: Agents continuously monitor the ROI of paid ad campaigns and autonomously move spend across different channels or audiences to optimize conversion rates.
  • Competitor & Market Research: Autonomous agents sweep the web, earnings calls, and news outlets daily to deliver actionable market intelligence directly to your product and marketing teams.

2. Middle of the Funnel (Lead Management)

  • Intent-Based Qualification: Agents track web visits, clicks, and third-party data to score leads instantly, drastically reducing response time from days to minutes.
  • Dynamic Lifecycle Nurturing: Instead of standard drip sequences, agents re-evaluate where a prospect stands in the buying cycle and craft specific, custom content to address their current hesitations.

3. Bottom of the Funnel (Sales Execution)

  • Assisted Selling (The Co-Pilot): Agents listen to active sales calls, draft context-aware follow-up emails, and update customer relationship management (CRM) systems behind the scenes.
  • Automated Sales Handoff: When a lead reaches high-intent thresholds, the agent passes the record to a human representative along with a comprehensive summary of past interactions and talking points.

Implementation framework: The Three-Tier Model

Organizations successfully adopting agentic AI categorize their deployment into three distinct layers of autonomy:

Operational Layer

Role of the AI Agent

Role of the Human

Augmented

Equips teams with research, tailored sales collateral, and recommendations.

Makes all outbound decisions and handles communication.

Assisted

Drafts follow-ups, listens to live calls for prompts, and logs data.

Directs the conversation and approves the output.

Autonomous

Independently engages leads via chat or email, qualifies them, and sets meetings.

Sets the strategic guardrails and steps in for high-stake negotiations.

Best Practices for Integration

  1. Adopt a Gradual Shift: Start with low-friction, high-return agents—such as analytics trackers or research assistants—before giving systems outbound customer communication rights.
  2. Embed, Don't Add: Do not treat agents as standalone software. Ensure they are directly integrated into your existing tech stack, operating directly within your CRM and marketing platforms.
  3. Define Clear Approval Flows: Establish strict guardrails. Explicitly document where an agent can act autonomously and where a human must review the output before it goes live.
  4. Follow the 10-20-70 Rule: Focus 10% of your effort on the AI models, 20% on cleaning up your underlying data, and 70% on retraining your team to manage and collaborate with these systems. 


вторник, 21 апреля 2026 г.

The Enterprise AI Agents Staircase

 




Tuesday morning. Your CTO walks in and says
the AI agent is live in production.

Everyone nods.
Nobody asks what is underneath it.

I have been in that room more times than I can count.

The agent is real.
The architecture holding it up is usually held together
by assumptions nobody has tested and decisions nobody documented.

Most teams celebrate reaching step four or five.
Agentic workflows. Multi-step reasoning. Function calling.

What they do not celebrate is what they skipped on the way up.

Context management that breaks under real load.
Memory mechanisms tested in a demo, not in production.
Evaluation loops that live in a deck, not in the system.

Here is what nobody tells you about skipping steps.

The failure does not announce itself.

It shows up six months later when an agent makes a decision
that costs the company money, reputation, or a compliance review.
And nobody in the room can explain why it happened
because nobody built the layer that would have caught it.

That is not a technology failure.
That is a governance architecture failure.

The most important question you can ask your AI team right now
is not what are we building next.

It is which layer underneath what we already built
is not actually load-bearing yet.

That answer will tell you more about your AI risk exposure
than any dashboard your team is currently reporting on.

Image Credit: Sivasankar Natarajan, follow him for more.


https://tinyurl.com/r2mu359f

суббота, 11 апреля 2026 г.

3 Easy, Unsexy AI Workflows that Will Save You 7 Hrs per Week

 


If you’re frustrated that you don’t know how to use agentic workflows to automate your work but you want to learn, this is for you.

It’s easy to see the viral Tweets and articles of people exclaiming how awesome their new AI system is and feel restless, stressed and left behind.

We know that this is the future of work, but how do we actually start using this?

Everyone will tell you you’re behind, but I’m here to tell you the opposite.

Claude Cowork has only been in existence for four months.

You’re still early.

And I’m going to give you 3 unsexy agentic workflows you can use to automate your work.

You don’t need to be technical. You just need to be willing to try it out.

Why unsexy automations?

Because usually the most useful AI use cases are unsexy.

Most of our time goes to a myriad of random tasks — writing follow-up emails, compiling reports, pulling numbers from dashboards. These random, unsexy and seemingly inconsequential tasks are our biggest opportunities.

Why listen to me?

I’m the head of product at a startup and 4 weeks ago, I automated 3 tasks that saved me 7 hours of busy work in a week.

I’ve been leading teams and building digital products for about 10 years, and most importantly, I have nothing to sell you.

So, with that out of the way, let’s get into it.

3 easy use cases that will save you 7 hours/week

Think of these as examples and jumping off points for you. Look for your analogous tasks.

Your imagination is most likely the limiting reagent to what’s possible, so let’s feed it some ideas.

  1. Use case 1: Last week I left 4 back-to-back meetings and opened Gmail to find 6 draft emails waiting for me — each one based on what was actually discussed in the meeting. They were suspiciously accurate. I reviewed and sent all of them in about 12 minutes. That used to take me over an hour.
  2. Use case 2: I used to spend forever writing weekly reports to my team. Before the automation, I had to DM people to remind them to send me their updates so I could compile them into a bigger report. Now I check Slack and see the draft report already written. I adjust a few sentences and hit send.
  3. Use case 3: I need to send regular updates on KPIs and metrics. Usually this requires checking multiple analytics dashboards and cobbling together an analysis. Now my automation has created a draft that’s 90% of the way there. I update the remaining 10% and send to my team.

So how do I actually build these out? (OVERVIEW)

Here are the speedy instructions so you can get a sense for the process below, and then I’ll walk through a specific example below.

  1. Download Claude desktop and get the $20/mo subscription. I recommend Claude because it can build automations for you, which ChatGPT can’t do. If you want to compare the quality of their outputs, give them both the same prompt and see for yourself.
  2. Click the “Cowork” tab. Cowork can create automations for you, while Chat cannot.
  3. Describe to Claude Cowork the automation you want to create and ask it the best way to do that.
  4. Do what it says and use your brain matter to double check the logic.
  5. KEY TIP: for emails, Slacks, or any actual output, clarify you only want a draft and that it shouldn’t send anything out. You should be the final sender.
  6. Connect the MCPs (connections to your tools) you need.
  7. Test the automation
  8. Fix the automation

The instructions here are light because when you hit step #3, you’ll need to follow Claude’s personalized instructions for your situation.

If you get stuck on a step, show Claude where you got stuck and ask it how to get past it.

That’s going to be way more helpful to you than if I give you the step by step of how I created my own automations, because your setup will be different.

Deep dive example: how I created an automation that listens to my calls and drafts any emails I need to write

This is the most valuable automation I’ve created.

I realized that a lot of my work came out of meeting action items, and that if my AI buddy Claude could listen into those meetings, I’d have to provide a lot less context to it manually when I asked it to help me with those action items.

I use Granola to record and transcribe all my calls and my company uses Gmail, so the first thing I did was to connect the Granola and Gmail MCPs (Claude calls them “Connectors”) to Claude so that it could access both.

You can add “Connectors” or MCPs by clicking Customize < Connectors < + button.

Connecting the tools here was sooo easy, it was awesome. And the information and tasks that my automations can now access and execute are tenfold.

Write a prompt of what you want to do

I dug up my old prompt to see what I wrote. Seeing how it’s written, I probably used dictation (highly recommend).

My prompt:

Can you create a daily automation searching for any calls that I have in granola and then find any action items that I need to do and then draft up a summary of my action items and then actually complete them.

If an email needs to be written, then I want you to generate a draft and let me know that I need to review it. If a user story or linear ticket needs to be written, same thing.

Draft it and let me know what the outstanding questions are and let me know so that I can review it.

Use that microphone icon and speak your prompts to your AI rather than typing it all out.

You’ll provide it more context, and it’ll perform better as a result.

Here’s a screenshot of the actual prompt I dictated to claude

This prompt isn’t winning any Pulitzer awards, but I lean towards making the initial prompts simple and giving it context where it asks.

I only spend time on the prompt when it’s a bigger or more complex task. Otherwise, I figure it out as I go.

Claude will ask you for more detail when needed, and you’ll realize where you need to provide more detail as you build it.

(For instance, I initially didn’t specify how often this automation should run. I later realized that I needed the automation to run every 30 minutes to check for any meetings that I just had.)

Be patient setting it up.

I had a lot of back and forth with this automation and I’m going to be honest with you, it had me banging my head against my Mac after the 7th repeat error.

But don’t give up.

We’re early to the tech, and there are pros and cons to that.

Think of it like training a new employee, and don’t give up just because it takes longer to set up than it would take to do it manually the first time.

The first couple times, it takes longer.

And then you never have to do it again.

The moment your automation works is a beauty like no other. Screenshot of the emails and user stories that my automation wrote for me right after a meeting I had.

How to troubleshoot when you’re not technical

The biggest issue I ran into was that the automation didn’t run when it was supposed to. It would just… not trigger.

I told Claude “hey, the automation was supposed to run at 10:30am but it didn’t — what happened and how do we prevent this?”

We ended up making a second automation to monitor the first one and fix it when needed. Automation babysitting another automation.

Welcome to the future.

Another issue: the email drafts were pulling action items from the wrong meeting. I told Claude which email was wrong, what meeting it should have pulled from, and asked it to fix the matching logic. It adjusted the automation and I haven’t had the issue since.

The pattern is always the same: describe what went wrong, what you expected, and ask Claude to fix it and prevent it from happening again.

In the beginning, you need to double check the automation’s work several times. That’s normal. You’re training it.

The more specific your feedback, the faster it gets good.

What does life look like after these 3 automations?

First of all, it’s extremely empowering to create your own personalized automations.

When you create your own automated systems, you are literally multiplying your impact and effectiveness in a way that was never possible before.

You become way more valuable as an employee, way more effective as a business owner, and you’re starting to learn how to coexist in the AI age.

Second of all, as the title suggests, I eliminate at least 7 hours of menial, boring, repetitive tasks a week through these 3 automations.

I don’t have to follow up with teammates about weekly reporting, I’m not writing tactical emails from scratch, and I’m not cobbling together an analysis across multiple dashboards.

I’m simply reviewing and editing content that has already been created for me, which is a lot faster and easier.

These 3 automations save me at least 7 hours of menial, boring, repetitive work a week. That’s almost a full work day I get back to spend on things that actually require my brain.

Now it’s your turn.

Download the Claude desktop app, click the Cowork tab, and try this prompt:

“I want to automate [your repetitive task]. Here’s how I currently do it: [your steps]. How can we automate this?”

Start with whatever task annoys you the most.

That’s your best first automation.

Ally Mexicotte

https://tinyurl.com/3bxunavu