<aside> What’s this about? Automating workflows using native automations, APIs, or AI tools can improve your organization’s efficiency while reducing errors e.g. from manual data input.
What do I need to do? Identify tasks that involve significant manual work (or result in significant error) and review this page for ideas on automating them.
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Make use of native automations within your software platforms as much as possible.
If you use Airtable (e.g. as a CRM or ATS) you have a powerful and flexible set of automations at your disposal, which can save you a lot of time and reduce the chances of manual error.
APIs are another handy tool for automation. API stands for Application Programming Interface, which is a software intermediary that allows two applications to communicate with each other.
Zapier is a great tool for making use of APIs. You can connect thousands of pieces of software with one another to create long chains of automated processes, such as notifying you when a Google Sheet row is updated — or using the data in that row to update the value of some other database.
Besides Zapier, G-Accon makes use of APIs from Xero, QuickBooks, and Google Sheets to automate your financial reporting.
AI offers an increasingly popular way of “automating” workflows — or, at least, speeding things up (with a slight chance of hallucination).
As of March 2025, ChatGPT with GPT-4o remains the gold standard for chatbots.
It’s great for summarizing data and giving you quick answers to queries that you might otherwise need to trawl through a Google search results page to find the answers for.
We suggest downloading the app, which you can pull up on your Mac at any time with Option + Space — with the text field already highlighted.
One underrated use case for ChatGPT is calculations from a spreadsheet. You can simply copy and paste a data selection — without further formatting — and ask ChatGPT to perform an operation, like calculating a weighted average. This is great if you forget the native formula.
Other use cases include:
Besides ChatGPT, other popular chatbots/LLMs include Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, and Meta’s Llama.