Automation strategy / SOP prerequisite

Automations are mostly a huge waste of time. I say that as someone who uses what I would call AI workflows for pretty much every task I do as a digital marketer.

I have over 100 prompt templates and Claude Projects that I use regularly. And some people might call this automation.

When I'm talking about automation, I mean things like Nathan and make.com. You've probably seen these people all over YouTube and TikTok talking about how you can automate all of your work.

And I have seen a handful of automations that make sense, but it's very rare. The vast majority of things that people are trying to automate with these platforms either shouldn't be automated or there's already software that does a better job.

And there's a few reasons for this. Is that it's still really hard to completely automate complex tasks.

A lot of times it feels like it's gonna be simple. You go through the process in your head and you're like, I could totally automate this and I've fallen into this trap and I've spent an entire day trying to automate one of my processes...

reason it's not worth building a complex automation is that you can get most of the benefit of these automations by just building a good cloud project or a custom GPT. For example, when I need to send a proposal to a client, I simply take the transcript from the call with the client where we discussed all the details.

I give it my cloud project that has instructions on how to take that information and turn it into a proposal. It knows everything it needs to know about my business and how I write proposals.

I copy the output from that cloud project and I paste it into gamma app and within about 7 minutes after the call ended, I have a beautiful customized proposal I can send to the client. Now sure, I could automate that and I maybe be able to do it in 3 minutes instead of 7 minutes except I wouldn't have the opportunity to review the proposal before I gave it to gamma and I wouldn't be able to make any changes to the gamma proposal before I export it and how many times would I have to run that automation to make up for the 8 hours it took me?

To build it...

rying to automate and ask, is there already software that does this? If there is, just use the software.

You're not just saving the upfront cost. Good software is going to be maintained and improved over time.

Save yourself from having to rebuild your automation 17 times in the future. And if you feel like you're falling behind cause you're not using automations, don't.

However, if you're not using AI at all, you are falling behind.