AI TRAINING
Zapier and Make AI Workflows for SMEs
Build five working AI-powered automations in Zapier and Make that your team uses from day one.
What it covers
A hands-on one-day workshop teaching ops-minded SME operators how to embed OpenAI and Anthropic building blocks into Zapier and Make scenarios. Participants configure real automations covering lead enrichment, document summarisation, support triage, and content drafting, with attention to error handling and token cost control. By the end of the day each participant has deployed at least two production-ready workflows. Five ready-to-steal recipes are provided as templates to take away.
What you'll be able to do
- Build and deploy a multi-step Zapier or Make scenario that calls an LLM API and routes the output to a business tool
- Write effective prompt templates with dynamic variables inside automation platforms
- Configure error-handling and fallback paths so automations fail gracefully
- Estimate and cap monthly API token costs before going live
- Adapt at least two of the five provided recipes to your own business context
Topics covered
- Anatomy of a Zapier/Make scenario: triggers, actions, and AI steps
- Connecting OpenAI and Anthropic APIs without code
- Prompt design inside automation tools (system messages, dynamic variables)
- Error handling, retries, and fallback paths
- Token usage tracking and cost controls for SME budgets
- Five ready-to-use recipes: lead enrichment, support triage, document summary, social draft, internal FAQ router
- Testing and iterating on live scenarios
- Basic data privacy hygiene when passing data to LLM APIs
Delivery
Delivered in person or via live video call (Zoom/Teams). Participants work on their own laptops throughout; the ratio is roughly 30% instruction to 70% hands-on building. A shared Notion workspace with all five recipe templates, prompt snippets, and a cost-calculator spreadsheet is provided. A 30-minute follow-up Q&A call one week after the workshop is included in most packages.
What makes it work
- Start with one high-frequency, low-risk task (e.g. internal summarisation) before automating customer-facing flows
- Set hard monthly spending limits on the API account before the workshop ends
- Assign one named owner per automation who monitors run logs weekly
- Store prompt templates in a shared doc so the whole team can iterate and improve them
Common mistakes
- Passing entire documents to the API in every run, causing runaway token costs within days
- Skipping error handling so a single bad API response silently breaks the whole workflow
- Writing prompts directly in the tool without version control, making iteration chaotic
- Sending personally identifiable customer data to external LLM APIs without checking terms or GDPR obligations
When NOT to take this
A company that already has a dedicated RevOps or data-engineering team and runs Make/Zapier at scale — they need practitioner-level API or iPaaS training, not this SME-oriented foundations workshop.
Providers to consider
Sources
This training is part of a Data & AI catalog built for leaders serious about execution. Take the free diagnostic to see which trainings your team needs.