Zapier: The Best AI Automation Agent You've Never Heard Of

Use AI bots to automate drafting email replies, managing your calendar, and more

Dear subscribers,

Today, I want to share a deep dive on Zapier Central.

Zapier is the only AI agent that can help you get work done across your favorite apps (e.g., calendar, email, spreadsheet) without you even being there.

The product is still early and not the most intuitive to use, but it’s incredibly powerful once you figure it out. So let’s explore how to use Zapier’s AI bots to automatically:

1. Bring AI to any webpage

2. Draft emails from new form responses

3. Be an virtual admin for your calendar

4. Answer support questions

5. Scrape structured data online

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1. Bring AI to any webpage

Think of Zapier Central as an AI agent that can automate work for you in 3 steps:

Get data from one source → Update it in some way → Save it in another source

A simple way to get started is to bring Zapier with you to any webpage:

1. Install the Zapier AI Chrome extension

2. Go to any webpage, open the extension, and start asking questions

For example, I used the extension to:

1. Extract data from a webpage: I asked Zapier to “List companies with 100 employees or more” from YCombinator’s top AI startups list. It produced a simple list in seconds that would’ve taken me 10 minutes to do manually.

2. Research a company or person: I asked Zapier to “Recap recent news in bullets” based on Wade Foster (Zapier CEO)’s LinkedIn posts. Use this to research companies before interviews or to draft personalized cold emails.

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2. Draft an email reply from a new form response

AI auto-drafts Gmail responses to sponsor form submissions for your review before sending.

Now let’s get to the fun stuff.

I have a Google form where companies can request to sponsor this newsletter. But checking the form and drafting email replies manually is a pain. So let's use Zapier AI to automate:

Get new form response → Draft email reply → Save it to Gmail drafts folder

This is perfect for any inbound sales prospecting. Here’s how it works:

1. Go to Zapier Central and create a new agent “Draft email”

2. Go to Behaviors and fill in:

   1. Trigger: Connect your Google Sheets account, select your sheet with the form responses, then choose "New spreadsheet row."

   2. Instructions: Write the prompt: "When a new row appears, draft an email with the following (email copy)." Add specific fields if needed.

   3. Behavior actions: Connect your Gmail account and select “Create draft”

3. Turn the behavior on. It should look like this:

4. Test it out by filling your form or hitting "test this behavior". Wait 5 min, then check your Gmail drafts. If it worked, you'll have a new draft email waiting.

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3. Hire an virtual admin for your calendar

Thanks to Zapier AI for saving my marriage 😅

If you’re a busy professional, your calendar is probably full of meeting conflicts and you probably wish that you had a personal admin.

So let’s automate:

Get Calendar events → Highlight top 3 meetings → Get email every Sunday night

Here’s how you can hire a virtual admin for free with Zapier: