Zapier Agents: What, Why, and How! (No-Code AI Automation Tutorial)

Key Takeaways

Welcome. Today we're going to dive into how to build an agent in Zapier. While the setup only takes moments, the real value is going to lie in the concepts, why you need an agent, and how to design one that works for you. Getting used to the terminology. Basically, by the end of this video, you'll be so comfortable with the process that you'll start spotting opportunities to automate your dayto-day workflows in so many different places. All right, so let's get started. In this video, I'm going to explain to you how to build an agent in Zapier. But more importantly, I want to explain to you what is an agent, why does that matter to your business and your day-to-day work goals and flows. Now, one particular customer I have done some work with. They run a chamber of commerce. So, they have multiple members of the chamber and they wanted to have a way of knowing, is that member in the news this week? Should I be congratulating them on something they've achieved or should we put them on our website to link back to this particular news that they had or success story? And to do that, the customer would have to do a lot of extra work. But with this, we can automate it. With this agent, we can automate that. So, we see AI creating a more personal interaction with a customer. We're not going to have the AI email them directly. We're not going to have the AI write the post directly. What we're going to do is surface the information so that the chamber manager can get back to that member in a more personal way. So you can see the balance here between agents doing the work and an agent doing something that helps you do the work more effectively. And by the time you're done with this, you'll have a better sense of how they fit into your everyday work. So when you're doing a task and you start to understand this, be like, "Oh, I could make an agent to do this." And that's the key here. So let's step in. We're going to use Zapier. they are the sponsor. I don't use sponsors who I wouldn't use for my customers or for myself. I believe that it's a product that can make a difference for your business. And so with their interface, we're going to go make this agent and you'll see how easy this can be. All right, let's go do that. So what we're going to do is we're going to log into Zap here and we're going to come to the Zaps dashboard. Now I started this by making a Zap and then I realized I just need to make an agent. So what I did was I clicked over here and started the agent. Now I want to get into the terminology of what makes an agent. So I've already made one here. We're going to make it together, but I made one earlier. And let's cover some of the terminology here that's really important for you to understand. So first we have triggers. The agent needs to know when to run. And that's called a trigger. So the trigger is the thing we do to wake up the agent. It could be a row added to a Google sheet. It could be something on the calendar. It could be something in HubSpot or Facebook or Box, notion. You see all these triggers that can wake up the agent to go do something. So, an agent isn't just running all day every day doing things. It it has these triggers that makes this one agent do what it's made to do. And I don't even want to say program to do because it's your prompt. So, let's look at that. So, here we have instructions. This is just a prompt. You're saying agent this is your job and it's going to be relative to the particular task at hand but it's also going to include the bigger picture of what your business is about. This is the work that you really need to get good at. It will be a result of you knowing your business needs knowing your business well in a lot of trial and error. You will make it prompt. The next concept is tools. This is really interesting. So basically, we're saying, "Hey, agent, go do this thing." In in our case, what we're going to do is say, "Agent, every Sunday, I want you to go look over every single member in our database. I want you to see if they've been in the news recently in the past seven days. And if they have, is this something that maybe I want to email them and say, "Congratulations," or put that on our website. And either way, at the end of all of this work you're doing for me, I want a list emailed to the staff of all the news that was going on that you saw. So either way, no matter what, at the end of this, we're either going to have a draft in our email box for these for each member. We're going to have a WordPress article in draft mode for the member and we're always going to have an email at the end of it to us saying, "Hey, I ran I found some interesting information. Here you go." Now, in this case, it needed tools. And when we make an agent, we're going to use the co-pilot to do this. So, it figured out all the tools it needed. I didn't have to do anything. But I say that knowing the WordPress I had to help set up. The air table I had to help set up. And I'm going to cover that as we go. But it decided, hey, you need a web search tool. You need a Gmail draft tool. You need the Air Table tool to talk to my database. It could be any database really. and you need the WordPress tool to then send information to the WordPress site. This is the hardest part. Setting up these tools to communicate with Zapier can take a moment. Getting the passwords right, getting everything set up, but once you get these set up, every next automation becomes easier and easier. So, knowledge sources are basically the context that helps AI know your business and know the rules and know how to do things. It's a very powerful feature and you can add multiple sources here. The last one we won't see up here as much but it's a concept that's called human in the loop. And that's it. So you have trigger prompts tools knowledge source and then human in the loop. Human in the loop is just that moment where the AI is not going to send these emails without your permission. The AI is not going to write to WordPress without your permission. The only email that's going to write no matter what is the one at the end of all of this to say to your staff and to you this is what I looked over just so you know it's running just so you can get a report of what you might have to do to follow up. But this human in the loop is you having a moment to approve or to verify or to check the work that it did. Now once you trust the system you might get to a place where you're like just send the email. All right. So now that we have a sense of how an agent works let's go make this agent. So, we're going to say new agent. And I'm going to paste in there a prompt I had that was what you saw earlier, but without all the tool calls because I'm going to let it do that. And it's just a business prompt. There's all these templates here, too. You could just start with one of these. That's it. Let it build and by the end of it, you might have everything you need. So, this is interesting. It looked inside of some particular items and it wants to know some info. All right, let's give it a go. All right, so I answered a few more questions. Now, you could have clicked through all of this. You could add the tools. You can add the knowledge base. I just want to show you how it could do it for you. Now, it's done with its job. I'm going to close this for a moment, but we can come back to that again. There you go. Need help later. Okay. So, we have our tools. Search the web, send an email, WordPress, create a post. And this is really neat. This is where I can say, what's the title? and it could set a specific value for the field or you can let the AI agent generate a value for the field. And then if we scroll down, we will see that it's in draft mode. That's neat. It did that for me. Now, this one's important because this is sending an email to the members. I want to do a different tool here. I want to do the Gmail draft. So, I think it's email and then just go into it and here we go. Create a draft. So, we're going to have it be a draft. And I'm going to just say create a draft. And it's my daily email. I'm going to let the agent decide who to send it to. I'm going to let the agent decide the subject. And then the body, let it figure that out. But this tool, this is the one it sends to the team every day that it's done. And so this one I do want it to send out to the team. So I'm okay with this one not being a draft. So we have all the tools it needs and has a knowledge base. Now, how do I test this out? What I'm going to do is I'm going to go to the agent preview and I'm just going to test. Nothing's going to really be sent to anybody. So, let's see what happens. Now, I just typed a forward slash and then all my tools show up there. Okay, that's really important. So, as you write this out in in just normal language, you can do a forward slash to bring in the tool. So, now I could click on that tool and make sure it's used in that particular moment in the prompt. That's really nice because you can easily integrate your plain language command or prompt with the tools it needs to use. So now if we go back to agent preview and we test again, we can go through the process. So let's see what happens. All right, we see some news being found. We see it's creating a post. This is cool. Now I'm being asked to approve, but I wouldn't have to if we were not testing here. It's sending a email to one of the members, but it's just a draft. Okay. And so we can go approve it. And I'll show you what that looks like in a moment. So if we go here to drafts, let me close this. So this is the draft. So I can go in here at the beginning of the day and just check them out and see if they make sense to me. All right. So the end of the process, it should summarize. Everything is done. Even if there's no results, we want to know it. Look at every member and searched. And this will go to the team without any approval because it's just us. All right. So, we're just going to publish this agent and we're ready to go. Publish. We can then modify it later and publish it when we're ready. Uh maybe we're just experimenting with some new ideas. We now have a published agent. That's this is your first agent. So, hopefully this gets you understanding agents, how they work, why they're a good idea. Thanks to Zapier for sponsoring. Please leave comments, ask questions, click the link to their sponsor link to help support the channel. But I really want to know more what building patterns you might want to know about. Leave the questions below. And I thank you for watching and I hope it helped.