No-code AI Agents from Zapier - The Dispatch #3
And steps on how you can easily implement AI agents in your life
Welcome all 5835 subscribers to another edition of The Dispatch. We’re going to talk about the hot thing of 2025 - Agents. But in this case, just focusing on Agents from Zapier. It’s easy enough for anyone non-technical to get started, and I hope you, dear reader, build your first agent today with Zapier.
Before we begin: In case you or someone you know would like to have a paid consulting call with me about product or AI, get in touch with me by replying to this email or emailing me at kavir @ hey dot com. You can check out how I can be useful here.
But first, what are agents?
Agents as defined by Anthropic, are: systems where LLMs dynamically direct their own processes and tool usage, maintaining control over how they accomplish tasks.
This is different from a workflow that just uses LLMs and AI to do a task and achieve a goal. I will cover more about agents in a subsequent piece, subscribe, like, and comment if you would like to read that.
Zapier Agents
I’ve been using Zapier Agents (earlier Zapier Central) for the last 4 months for one particular use case and it’s proving to be really useful.
In a nutshell, Zapier agent is an AI-powered automation tool that combines Zapier's integration capabilities across 7000+ apps and platforms with LLMs to perform complex and contextual tasks like drafting emails or creating content.
What did I use it for?
My use case was to draft Gmail replies contextually for a service business. The problem statement was that it takes time for the team to prepare and send replies. Some team members are not that proficient in English and hence have to rely on the lead to review the message and send it.
I decided not to send these automatically but to create drafts to keep the human in the loop who can review and send them.
But it still saves a lot of time — so if this AI bot writes 10 email drafts a day, which would've normally taken 5 minutes per email, bringing it down to 1 minute per email, it still saves 40 minutes per day - 80% time-saving. And many times replies are not sent because it's just cumbersome to think and write.
Setup
I set it up in just a few minutes and it’s saving at least an hour a day for the team.
Using LLMs and RAG, you can set up common rules, scenarios, and context and prepare response.
For e.g. I had a message template Google Sheet that had most of the scenarios and how to respond. You could have it in Google Docs, Notion, or anywhere else.
Apart from that, in the system instructions you can add a lot of detail on the type of your business, and how you want the bot to respond - for e.g. empathetically and politely.
Here are the steps:
1. Go to Zapier Agents and create an account. You get free 400 tasks a month.
2. Create a new behavior
3. Connect all your accounts
4. Add a trigger (could be a schedule, or chat, or email received) - I have kept it at multiple intervals during the day to batch process
5. Add your instructions (use ChatGPT or Claude to create a good prompt
6. Only have it run on the emails from other people and not marketing emails - so add category:primary or other filters. And you can filter out some auto-email notifications like Zoom, Tally, Google Calendar, etc And add a filter for newer_than. Because it cant run on all your emails from eternity. For e.g newer_than:12h
7. Add context docs
8. Test it out properly to ensure it is doing what it is intended to do, if not tweak the instructions and the email filters
9. And finally publish!
Other Applications
What other things you can do:
Create a sales outreach agent
Lead enrichment agent
Sales prep agent
Marketing blog draft creator
Search the web and add to CRM
Let me know in the replies and comments — what would be your use cases for agents in your work, company, or personal life?
📘 Read of the week
Understand what agents really are, in this guide by Anthropic.
Thanks for reading till the end!
Another reminder: In case you or someone you know would like to have a paid consulting call with me about product or AI, get in touch with me by replying to this email or emailing me at kavir @ hey dot com. You can check out how I can be useful here. Alright then, talk soon!