Unlock AI Automation: Harness AI to Automate Email Attachment Analysis

• This Article’s Use Case
• In this Article
• The Tools You Need
• Setting Up Your Tools
• Overview of the Automation Flow
• Step-by-Step Guide
• Demonstration
• Conclusion
• TL;DR
• Article Resources
• Subscribe
• Contact Me
• References
• Recent Articles

To follow along, you'll need:

• Google Drive and Gmail: You can use Outlook 365, but we’ll focus on Google Workspace.
• Zapier Pro Account: This is a multi-step process, so a Pro account is necessary.
• OpenAI API Access: API access with available credit. You will need an API key.
• Monday.com Account: The trial version is fine.

Before diving into the automation, ensure your Zapier account is set up, and you have created a new Zap. You need access to the OpenAI API and require an API key.

This tutorial, Exploring AI Automations, gives you instructions on the above setup tasks.

Here’s a quick overview of the steps in the Zap flow:

• Trigger: A new email matching a search in Gmail.
• Find Attachment: Upload the attachment to Google Drive.
• Convert Document to Text: Use Zapier to convert the document to text.
• ChatGPT Conversation: Use the extracted text in a ChatGPT conversation.
• Create Draft Email: Use ChatGPT’s output to create a draft email.
• Add Task to monday.com: Create a task in monday.com with the relevant data.

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Watch the video>>>.

Step 1: Email Interception

Set up a new email matching search in Gmail. For this example, we’re looking for the keyword “brief” in the email subject.

Step 2: File Upload to Google Drive

Once the email is found, the attachment is uploaded to a designated folder in Google Drive. Ensure the file permissions are set correctly.

Step 3: Convert to Google Doc

It’s crucial to convert the uploaded file to a Google Doc format. This allows us to extract the text content, which isn’t possible with a Word document.

Step 4: Find the file on Google Drive

We now find the file just uploaded to Google Drive. This is so that we can use the 'Raw Text' version of the file. Google creates various versions of the file, Text, PDF, Zip etc. We make use of this feature.

Step 5: Extract Text Using Zapier

Zapier’s “Text from file” action helps convert the Raw Text Google Doc into a text format. This text will be used in the next step with ChatGPT.

Step 6: ChatGPT Analysis

Set up a conversation with ChatGPT, assigning it the role of a specialist in parsing and analysing text from documents. The task is to convert the text into clean JSON format, ready for further processing.

Step 7: Convert JSON to Variables

Use JavaScript to convert the JSON output from ChatGPT to variables. We now have the data in usable format.

Step 8: Create Draft Email

Use a Gmail action to create a draft email. Add dynamic text data from the JavaScript step to the Draft email.

Step 9: Add Task to monday.com

Finally, add a task to Monday.com, using data from the document to ensure all necessary details are included.

To illustrate this process, we conducted a live demo using a complex Word document as an attachment. The document was sent via email, intercepted by our Zap, and processed through each step seamlessly. The task was added to monday.com, showing the automation flow works perfectly.

The demo can be found on this video: Automate Extraction of Email Attachments.

I can help you with your:

1. Zapier Automations
2. AI strategy;
3. Prompt engineering;
4. Content creation;
5. Custom GPTs.

I am available for remote freelance work. Please contact me.