@tjrobertson52

It is very quickly becoming easier to automate things. Just in the last few weeks, all the major model makers have released features that make it easier to set up automations. But that'd be fun to run through a few of them.

I actually did a video a few months ago about how most automations are a waste of time. In that video, I was talking about n8n, which can be very useful, but my point was that most things that people try to automate end up being a waste of time. And that might still be true, but it's definitely less true today than it was a week ago.

I think we are very quickly moving towards a world where automations are so easy to set up that they just become mandatory. So let's talk about the major announcements from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. OpenAI announced a bunch of stuff at their Dev day, but in terms of automation, they announced what they're calling Agent Builder.

This seems like OpenAI's response to Google's Opal, which is a lot like N 8 n or zapper, but much easier to use. Agent Builder seems to fall somewhere between n8n and Opal. It's a little more advanced than Google Opal, but not quite as simple to set up.

Still much simpler than n8n. The main use case seems to be creating agents that integrate with MCP servers, MCP being The primary protocol used connect agents to software. 5 computer use.

This is an agent that can use a browser. 5. It seems like it's just a cheaper, simpler way to have an agent use a browser on your behalf.

And in theory, it could do anything that you could do on a browser. As with all the other agentic browsers, it's still very slow and fairly limited in what it can do well, but it shows that Google's invested in this. I think it's safe to assume that eventually this will be really good and we'll all have agents using browsers on our behalf.

Finally, Anthropic just announced their Claude Chrome extension. This adds a Claude chat window directly into the side panel of Chrome and allows Claude to take actions on your behalf inside the browser. And if you missed it about a month ago, Claude also announced the ability to create spreadsheets and slide decks.

I'm still not sure what the best use cases will be for all these technologies. We've introduced a few new automations at our marketing agency, but we're mostly just experimenting right now. What's clear is that this technology is improving very quickly.

It can be hard to figure out the best time to start automating a specific task, but it's clear that every year, it's gonna make sense to automate more and more of them.