103 | AI Productivity Boost: Automate Workflows with AI in Zapier Central with Valeriya Pilkevich

0:00Hello and welcome to another live episode of the Leveraging AI podcast, the podcast that shares practical ethical ways to leverage AI to improve efficiency, grow your business and advance your career. This is Isar Maitis, your host, and we have an absolutely amazing show for you today. But before we dive into that, one more piece of really exciting update from us. So those of you who've been listening to the show for a while know I've been teaching AI courses since of April of last year. We're teaching two courses every single month, but most of these courses are private, meaning companies and organizations hire me to train just their people, meaning it's not accessible to the public.

0:39we open a public course about once a quarter. So we had one in October and then one in January and then one in April. And now we're opening the July one. It's going to start on July 8th and it's four sessions of two hours with me as the instructor with amazing people always that participate and engage and help each other. So it's a very powerful course. It's called AI Business Transformation Course for a reason. It literally helped hundreds of companies by now really understand how to implement AI successfully in a business context. So we talk about strategy, we talk about systems and processes, we talk about people, we talk about the steps that you need to do in order to implement this, and it includes a lot of hands-on training and implementation across multiple aspects of the business.

1:24If that's something that interests you, Joyce is going to drop a link in the chat. If you're listening to this after the fact, then there's going to be a link in the show notes for you to find. And as part of the celebration of the 100th episode, we're doing a promotion that we've never done before, which is$200 off with the promo code LeveragingAI100 with LeveragingAI as uppercase all of it. So LeveragingAI uppercase 100 to get$200 off the course. We're probably going to run this for about a week and that's it. So if that's something that's interesting to you and you want to do this, A, sign up because there is limited seats and B, use the promo code because that's going to expire.

2:03now to the really exciting episode that we have today. So, you know, one of the big promises that AI gives us is business efficiency. And part of it comes through using AI within a automation of some sort. There's a few questions about that. Number one is how do we actually do this consistently? So those of you who are trying to build different automations with AI knows it not always works perfectly, only sometimes. The other thing is that you probably know if you try to use GPTs is, and when I say GPTs, is the custom GPTs within ChatGPT, which is how a lot of people are now creating these small automations.

2:45They have a lot of limitations that do not allow you to do everything that you want. Now, there's ways to go around that and connect GPTs or just regular prompts through tools like Zapier or Make. But Zapier actually did something really interesting not too long ago. So two to three months ago, they've announced Zapier Central, which is a tool within Zapier that allows you to build really amazing AI automations. with the biggest benefit of them is that the fact that they're connected to the entire Zapier universe. So 6 ,000 applications that are already connected are connected to Zapier Central.

3:25Now, our guest today is an expert and a no-code automation ninja across every kind of business automation that you can imagine. So Valeria Pilkovich is passionate, really passionate, you will see that in a minute, about marketing and about productivity. And her background is marketing and marketing analytics. So both the marketing side, but as well as the data and automation and processes side of this, which makes her the perfect expert on that. She's already created multiple Zapier Central bots to help her run multiple aspects of her business. And she's doing the same thing for many of her clients.

4:06And today she's going to share with us specific use cases, like how to run more efficient email management, calendar management, content creation, stuff that every business needs built with Zapier Central. And she's going to share all the details and the steps exactly how you can do the same. I'm personally really excited to learn that because I started tinkering with it, but I haven't really built anything with Zapier Central yet. So I'm really excited to do this. Valeria, with a really long intro, I'm really excited to have you at the show. Welcome to Leveraging AI.

4:40In the next few years, AI technology will change our world dramatically. Whether you are a business executive trying to catapult your business forward, or just somebody who refuses to be left behind and want to advance your career, this is the show for you. I'm your host, Isar Maitis, a serial entrepreneur and an AI enthusiast. You'll hear invaluable practical tips from innovative business leaders, AI practitioners, and some of the brightest AI minds in our world today. on how you can leverage AI in ethical ways to advance your career and grow your business.

5:20Thank you. Thank you, Isar. Yeah, I'm really excited to be here and share with you my experience so far. Please feel free to ask questions. And of course, I'm happy to share every secret. And maybe first, before I start, let me know in the chat, maybe just type a plus if you ever experimented with custom GPTs. Custom GPTs are like the custom versions of the chatbot, of the OpenAI chatbot, obviously, that you can feel with your instructions and knowledge base. And so maybe the first question you might have, okay, we already have our custom GPTs, which work fine for us, but what's in it in Zapier Central bot?

6:00It's a bot as well, right? And the answer is there are a few differences or actually fewer advantages of Zapier bots. And first one Isara already mentioned is that Zapier integrates already automatically with more than 6 ,000 apps, which means that if you played around with custom GPTs, you probably have seen this actions part below. So, and you know that unless you have coding knowledge, it's quite hard to actually set it up, this action. And even if you do, there are some instructions, for example, for Zapier, how you set them up, this schema to be able to access your calendar or email. But for me, I did it and it's really lagging or sometimes it just doesn't retrieve or sometimes it would retrieve the emails from, I don't know, maybe last month or calendar events from completely not relevant.

6:52and sometimes it just it gets broken and you have to set it up again so this kind of integration part with other external apps if you are no code if you do not really know how to code it was hard and this is already the first one which zapier central solves because i will show you you do not even have to set up the exact automation you do not have to use the code whatsoever it actually you just have to provide the access to your account, any website, and the AI will guess basically what you want or what you need in this exact scenario. So that's the first part. The second part is live data. And it's a huge one.

7:33It sounds, okay, that's not such a big deal, but it is. If you think about your custom GPTs, you put the knowledge base, either PDF or Excel, and let's say honest, let's be honest, sometimes it even has difficulties to retrieve this data. Sometimes it's also only retrieves like a few parts of it, but not actually goes through the data and retrieves what you really need. And with Zephyr Central, you can just connect it to your live data sources. You can connect to Airtable. You can connect to Notion database. You can connect to your Google Sheets. And as soon as you actually update the data there, it will automatically be updated.

8:09It will automatically be synced. So these are the two probably huge differences. and maybe the third one is that for custom gpt's you would have to go back to the gpt in case you need something right you would have to trigger it with your message for zapier central once you set it up set up the behaviors i will show you it just works automatically like for me i set up a few chatbots which i will share with you today for email management the calendar management i think like relevant for everyone literally it doesn't matter if you have your own business or if you're professional and work for a company or if you, I don't know, like for anyone really very important or very handy.

8:53And it just works on autopilot. You just set it up every time when you have a email or maybe an hour before you have a new meeting. It just runs it automatically. You don't even have to look at it. Personally, I never even go to the Zapier boats. I just set them up once and they work. Amazing. I want to pause you for, first of all, a very quick summary and then ask you a question that is very relevant. The quick summary is three benefits that you mentioned. One is the fact that it's connected to the Zapier universe, which is huge. The second is that the data is live, right? So it's not, I've uploaded the document and that's it.

9:31And the third was, you don't have to trigger it. It kind of triggers like any other Zapier. So basically what you're saying, it's like the best of both worlds. It's a Zapier automation, but that runs smart because it has AI in the background. So this is amazing. The question that I have, one of the biggest limitations that I've seen, or two limitations that I've seen on GPTs, and I have a lot of them. So I have nothing against GPTs. It's not this, right? GPTs are awesome. They have their use cases. But two limitations that they have. One is they're limited to 8 ,000 words, which if you're trying to write a really long instruction, you get stuck, and then you can't continue.

10:08and then you have to figure out what you want to give up on or maybe string different two automations. You basically get stuck. And the second thing is you're limited with the amount of data you can upload as far as reference information, right? Either by the amount of files or by the size of files and then you get stuck. Do these limitations exist on the Zapier side as well, like on Zapier Central? That's a great question. I haven't, honestly, like from the instruction part of it, maybe I did not create such a long instruction But if you think about it already, if you can put separately your knowledge base, and if you could put separately already the integrations, the different behaviors, because you always have to think maybe what's the point of using those different tools.

10:56And as you mentioned, custom GPTs, it's a great example for many different use cases. And for example, if you are already used to the interface of OpenAI, and if you don't need these integrations, and if you don't need it to work on the backend, if you need to, I don't know, to analyze the specific data which you upload, I don't know, maybe customer sentiment or something else, then you can then simply stay with the custom GPTs. But if you need those integrations or if you have a live data source which constantly updates, this is when I would go to Zapier Central. But so far, I didn't discover that there was a specific amount.

11:36And at least it is not stated on the website that there is a specific amount of characters that you can put in the instruction. And obviously, you can chat in this chatbot window as long as you want. So it does not remember the data, what you chatted about, I don't know, weeks before, but you probably don't need it as well. Again, because the use cases I use it with are rather completely automated. So I don't really go to the chatbot to chat with it. It's rather, it just works in the background. Okay, awesome. Quick question from the audience. Danielle is asking, does it integrate with SharePoint, Adobe Cloud, or OneDrive?

12:16yeah it must we can check it now together so there are 6 000 apps and these are that's what I'm saying consider everything in zapier a potential connection so I'll be really so I was I would have been really surprised if that would have been no but let's dive in let's do the magic yeah let me share my screen and I will show you a few use cases and then I think it will be clearer by the way for those of you going to listen to this as the podcast one is we're going to share and explain exactly everything that's on the screen. So you will understand what we're talking about. But B, if you're not driving right now or on a walk with your dog and you can watch, you can switch to our YouTube channel.

12:55So it's Multiply AI YouTube channel and Multiply spelled with AI in the end instead of a Y in the end. And we're going to drop the link for that in the chat so you can find it as well. And the link is also on the show notes if you are on whatever podcast player, you can find it that way. But if you are on the podcast, that's perfectly fine. We're going to explain everything that's on the screen. Thank you. So this is just a website page, Zapier Central. It's a separate product of Zapier, but you have to have a Zapier account. So if you already have a Zapier account, you don't have to have a paid plan.

13:30You can just start with a free plan. Just register at Zapier and then you go to this page, Zapier Central. You can start by just clicking this button, try Central today. And you have around 400 actions per month, which is if you set it up smartly, it will be even enough for you with this free plan. And I will show you, I will share with you some secrets. And as you can see here, it's already, it's talking about the benefits like connecting the live data and 6 ,000 integrations and so on. and the great about this site which I really recommend you to check out is that it already gives you some, let's say some inspiration for the bots that you can create because obviously every one of us have different use cases and you can just check it out and already there will be like a pre-filled integrations or pre-filled instructions, for example.

14:23Yeah, pre-event notifications, hot lead notifications, RSS bot and so on. Just check it out and yeah, and start experimenting. So for me, let me know if you are able to see my screen now actually with the chat. Yep. Okay. So I will show you, I will start with the two, which are like really run on autopilot and are really helpful to me. One is the email assistant bot I created and the other one is calendar bot. So in Zapier, you probably already recognize the interface. It's a chat. And the different thing from, for example, custom GPTs here is that again, data sources. So you can connect your live data sources and let's see what you can connect.

15:07So for live data sources, it's still limited what you can connect, but they always work on it. I think there are already more integrations than two months before. So you can collect data from Google Sheets, even from Excel, from Google Drive, from Airtable, from Notion, which means that if you have the database in Notion, you just automatically connect to choose your Notion account. And once you update something in Notion, it will be synced here as well. But do not confuse this with the integrations with the 6000 app where it actually integrates to perform different actions. Then you have instant actions.

15:47Basically, if you stay in this chat and start chatting to it, for example, I already added some actions. Like I already added my Gmail account and I allowed it to create draft and label emails and find different emails. So basically, I can already start chatting with it and say, OK, show me the emails that are incoming today and I can start chatting with it. But it's not the best part. The best part is the behaviors. So behaviors is exactly what you set up and what differentiates it from custom GPTs, which work then automatically. So for behaviors, there's usually a certain trigger. So for example, when this behavior starts, it's if you use Zapier or Make, you know what the trigger is.

16:32And for example, currently I set up every time when I received a new email and I'm using Gmail. But again, you can use Outlook, you can use all the different emails account that is possible, Microsoft Outlook and so on. or what I was telling to you about, if you don't want to use or if you don't want to be run out of your actions very quickly, you can even set up something called Scheduled by Zapier. And you can set it up, for example, to only check your emails once a day. Oh, interesting. Once a day or twice a day. And it's maybe every time because currently Trans to Action, every time I get the email, and honestly, I'm subscribed to so many newsletters, I get the email like every five minutes, which it just sends to archive and I'm using my actions.

17:23So maybe it's not the smartest way. Maybe the smartest would be to say, okay, just check it like three times a day or five times a day and just label them and do everything that you want. So again, just to clarify the difference, I assume it doesn't matter how many times you run it. It will still run on the X number of emails you have. but because you're going to have less emails on your inbox because they automatically get sent to archive, that's why you're going to save the money, right? It's not the fact that it runs less times. It's the fact that there's going to be less emails to work with.

17:53No, it's actually, it will be considered one action. You just set it up one time a day. So even if it brings in like 35 emails at one time, it's still one action? Yeah. Oh, so yeah. Okay. Great tip. Yeah. That's okay. I tested it. And if you have really a lot of emails, it might not be able to get over each of them, each one of them. Yeah, there are still limitations. So sometimes just play around with it. Sometimes try with the, at the beginning you have 400 actions per month. It's a lot. Try to set up with every new email, see if you really need it and then just experiment. Okay. Yeah. Okay, so this is the trigger and then you have the instruction.

18:34And the instruction is basically the same instruction that you would use for custom GPT. I haven't heard of any specific rules for Zapier Central instructions. So I just follow the same logic as if I would be creating like a custom GPT. I would put a delimiter with something like an instruction or role and a task. And if we're talking about maybe content creation, here we do not. I would put something like an output and maybe examples. But here, for example, I just set up the instructions which are relevant for me. So I told it, okay, you're my helpful email assistant and you need to check my Gmail inbox and sort out emails for me.

19:14And then I just set up like a logic. For example, I said, okay, if it's just a personal email, draft a casual, polite reply. So I don't want it to send a reply because, okay, I do not recommend it either to you yet. So it drafts the reply and later I will show you my inbox as well. It looks really well. And the best part for me, because actually I live in Germany and some emails, some incoming emails are in German language. Although the instruction is written in English, it can identify that the email is in German and it actually drops to reply in German language as well. I think it's really cool.

19:49And then I also asked it to analyze the contents of the email. And if it thinks the email is urgent, then it has to actually send me a Slack message and add Trello card for my Trello account so that I can see, okay, that's an urgent email. And then the second one, currently I exchanged the email address, but then I also set up if the email is from following senders, and then you can simply add the email addresses from maybe your business partner. So it was relevant for me. then I asked it to add the business label to the email and also create the draft reply and summarize it and send me a Slack message and the same also analyze it if it's urgent then add the Trello card that I have to reply immediately to this email and then if the email is like marketing or promotional just add the label archived by Zapier and archive it and if it's a calendar event notification then do nothing.

20:49So that's quite a simple instruction and it works well. And yeah, and I will show you my inbox now. And what I like about it as well is that, of course, you have to give access or you have to give access to your Gmail box or, for example, Slack or Trello if you wanted to send you some notification. And what I really like about it is that as soon as you connect it to your Gmail, for example, you don't have to specify what exactly, like to whom exactly and in which thread exactly and what should be in the body. And you can specify it. And that is not only for Gmail, it's for Google Calendar and for everything else where you have the actions.

21:33But the best part is that if you worked with Zapier Automation so that you can, you have to specify everything there or like you have to specify for automation to work. Otherwise, it will be just broken. it will not work. But here, it's the beauty of it. You just say, okay, have AI guess the value of this field. I said, okay, add the Trello card. And then for list, for name, for description, I say, okay, have AI generate the value. So I don't even have to think about it. I don't even have to tell it. This must be exactly this board and this list and this description and this label. It just figures it out.

22:11So I want to pause you just for one second, first for a quick summary, and second to explain what's on the screen for people just listening. So first of all, I'll start with what's on the screen. So the screen has really four different components, but three that you put input to. One is what's the trigger, like what's going to start the behavior. In this particular case, an email comes in, or like Valeria said, if you want to save time, every three hour, go check my email. But it's something that triggers the process. Step number two is the instructions. What do you want to do when that thing happens?

22:42In this particular case, when an email comes in, and Valeria just gave it in simple English. If it's a personal email, do this. If it's a business email, do that. If it looks urgent, do this. If it's spam, do that. Literally what you would have told a great assistant to do as far as setting up the instructions. And then the third component is just, okay, what does Zapier Central need access to in order to do these things? So in this particular case, it needs access over to Gmail, but she says, okay, open a Trello task or card on whatever specific board. And if it needs to set meeting, then it needs connection to the calendar.

23:21Like whatever you want it to do, you need to give it access to it. But that's it. Once you give it access, it will know on its own how to do the thing. So this is like an amazing assistant that has access to everything you're willing to give it access to and can do actions literally by you explaining it in simple English. Yeah, exactly. And of course, once you set it up, you can test this behavior. But for now, since it's running for me already for past few weeks, I'll just show you my Gmail inbox. Please don't do any screenshots. so it's just basically as you can see already from the first glance there are these labels right and there's archived by zapier on many of my like marketing emails and i was checking it really and it is really marketing promotional emails it never puts the archived label on some personal emails and then of course i can just go to this archived ordinar archived folder i never do it i just ignore them because it's okay it's not so relevant if it's a business email it's and And there is, for example, I was discussing the collaboration with the brand and it puts the label as a business, right?

24:32And if it's an invitation from ISAR for this meeting, it doesn't put any label. It didn't create any reply because it's an invitation to a calendar meeting. And for the reply, it creates also very nice replies. Which model is it using in the background? Do you know? No, actually not. I'll have to check it. Yeah, I'm curious. Yeah. And just another one, it would be like, what I was meant to tell you is that it also replies in German language. That's where I was not expecting it. I was like, okay, it will work for some emails, maybe not for others, but then it actually created reply drafts as well for a German language.

25:10And if you want to improve maybe further, you could say, okay, and this is my, I can add my tone of voice and I can add a list of my emails to the prompt or maybe to the knowledge base to even replicate how you would reply. But honestly, I'm even happy with the replies that it creates. I rarely really reformulate them. First of all, it's amazing. Again, I'm blown away with this capability. A couple of questions, one for me and then some from the audience. For me, is there a way to give it additional data, like beyond these sources, like a GPT? Yes, of course. Here you can connect the data sources.

25:52Data sources. Okay, cool. And then you can put in whatever you want, like documents, files. Yeah, yeah. You can even, like you can put, for example, the Excel here, you have the possibility or Google Sheets, Google Docs. I don't think you can put, yeah, yeah. I don't think you can put PDFs, but if you have a PDF, you can as well. Make it a Google Doc and then make it something else. Yeah. So they promote themselves or Zapier Central promotes itself with this opportunity to connect the live data but of course if you need a knowledge base there you can also put it there awesome just again try to differentiate use cases like i would not recommend you to go all in and zapier central and quit custom gpt because there are certain use cases for example those zapier bots you cannot share it with someone so you cannot for just custom gpts are great as lead magnets or if you have a team and you work together on some specific use case maybe you have a marketing team and you need to create, I don't know, Instagram ads or headlines or whatever.

26:51And then you put all your knowledge base and you work together. Here, you cannot share it with someone. You cannot make it as a lead magnet. Technically, it is shared because if the outcome is, okay, go share this file on our Google Drive or create this thing on our Notion, then it's everybody's Notion and everybody's Google Drive. Yeah, that's true. And then everybody can see it, right? Because it's connected to your daily tools, then the tools are shared by everybody and that solves that problem, right? It's still a very capable thing as far as sharing it. So yes, people don't have access to your GPT, but they have access to the outcome of the GPT, which is what you actually want.

27:32Zane is asking, any other alternative to Zapier for creating up the AI chat spots? although Zapier is a good tool, but I want to know more about alternatives being available, but definitely going to try Zapier. So do you know any other tools that do something like this? That's a good question. I think it's unique in its way because it's like a chatbot for you that integrates with different apps and the live data. You cannot deploy it on a website, so it's not the chatbot in the traditional sense. So you cannot use it on your lead. It's not a lead generation chatbot. for chatbots the great solutions i know is for example voice flow it's the one i've been working with it's not just it's not set up in stones what you put in there but it's actually more conversational it can go different directions you can also integrate it with make for example if you want to i don't know to capture lead on your website and obviously you can deploy it somewhere else even custom gpts you can deploy somewhere else and yeah maybe again it's i think all of these tools are relevant and useful and there are very specific use cases in which one or the other one is better.