AI signal vs. noise

Welcome to The Workflow!

Welcome back to another edition of The Workflow, where we explore the latest in the world of workflow automation. In today’s edition, we’re exploring which AI workflows can deliver value today vs. sometime in the future vs. maybe never… With all the AI hype, finding the signal vs. noise is tough. After reading today’s newsletter, we hope you’ll have a stronger sense of where the value is with AI today and what’s coming tomorrow.

Today’s Topics

• Where’s the AI signal vs. noise?

• Turn meeting notes into follow-up emails

• Workflow automation news

• Workflow Tweet of the week

Read time: 5 minutes

Where’s the AI signal vs. noise?

After working with a ton of AI tools, we’ve come up with a non-exhaustive list of where we see the current value across the most popular AI workflows. We’ve found the top bucket of use cases easy to get high-quality output today. In the next bucket of use cases, you can get high-quality output, but it takes some work or advanced knowledge. Finally, in the bottom bucket of use cases, most of the tools feel like futuristic prototypes — they make for great demos but they’re not practical to use in production workflows yet.

🚀 Helpful, current use cases today:

• Transcription, speech-to-text

• Content analysis and summarization

• Code generation

• Content outlining/brainstorming/transformation

• Translation, text-to-speech

• Unstructured to structured data

• Chat with a knowledge base (i.e. RAG)

🤞 Almost there, but challenging to get quality results:

• Image generation

• Graphic design

• Presentation generation

• Web design

• Web browsing

📉 Shows early promise, but not there yet, maybe someday:

• Video generation

• Novel content generation

• Data enrichment

• App creation

Let us know if you want us to go deeper into any of the above use cases. Respond to this email or fill out one of our surveys below and we’ll do a deep dive into it in a future edition!

Turn meeting notes into follow-up emails

Ever wished your meeting notes could write follow-up emails for you? 🤔

This week’s workflow recipe uses a few of the most helpful AI use cases—transcription and content transformation—to do just that.

We've been experimenting with using Fireflies, Zapier, OpenAI, and Gmail to take meeting recordings and transform them into follow-up emails. It's been a game-changer for post-meeting sales follow-ups.

Steps to follow:

• Fireflies records and transcribes the meeting

• Zapier triggers a ChatGPT conversation

• ChatGPT drafts a follow-up email based on the transcript

• Gmail creates a draft with the AI-generated content

The result? A personalized follow-up email waiting in your drafts folder minutes after each meeting. 📧✨

Workflow automation news

• Is GenAI an Existential Risk to Low Code/No Code? Low-code/no-code platforms simplify software development. So does GenAI. While the sun isn’t setting on low code/no code just yet, it may eventually—or not. (Great read!)

• Introducing postgres.new Supabase has launched an in-browser Postgres sandbox with AI assistance. With postgres.new, you can instantly spin up an unlimited number of Postgres databases that run directly in your browser (and soon, deploy them to S3).

• Move over SEO, Profound is helping brands with AI search optimization Search engine optimization (SEO) has been top of mind for brands for more than a decade. But search is changing, and as consumers increasingly turn to AI chatbots like ChatGPT or Claude to search for things, brands need a new strategy.

Workflow Tweet of the week

Ways To Connect

1. Ask a Workflow Question: Submit a workflow question, and I’ll answer it in a future edition or respond to you directly.

2. Get Featured: Are you automating personal or business workflows? If so, I’d love to feature you in The Workflow! Reach out with your workflow, automation tip, or related content.

3. Book a 1:1 Call: Grab time with me to discuss all things automation, whether it’s specific automations for your business, AI and no-code tool recommendations, or whatever you’re looking for help with.

4. Work With My Agency: Do you work at an AI, no code, or SaaS startup? Are you looking to better educate your users? Find out how Onboard can help put your user education on auto-pilot.

Thanks for reading!

Garrett from The Workflow

Find me on X, LinkedIn, or Book a 1:1 Call

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