How to automate ChatGPT | Zapier


ChatGPT, dubbed the “original” AI chatbot for obvious reasons, can do just about every menial task under the sun. It can craft emails at scale, write social media posts, summarize transcripts, and write code for non-coders. It can even explain quantum theory, if you’re so inclined to learn. 

And while you can do all of these things inside ChatGPT’s interface, our ChatGPT integration lets you pull in the power of AI directly into your workflows. That means you can automate the things you already do in ChatGPT and move data across thousands of apps.

For example, want ChatGPT to interact with your teammates and answer common questions directly in Slack? Or perhaps you want ChatGPT to reply directly to customer queries in Facebook—using your tailored company documentation.  

Whatever your use case, we’ll show you different ways to pull in the power of ChatGPT into Zaps—Zapier’s automated workflows.

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What’s the difference between Zapier’s ChatGPT and OpenAI integrations?

There are a ton of different ways to use our ChatGPT integration, and some of them are quite similar to our OpenAI integration. But there are a couple of differences to keep in mind. 

For starters, the ChatGPT integration (GPT-3.5 turbo and GPT-4 for users who’ve made a payment of $5 or more) is designed primarily for conversations—and its responses will often be in chat format. 

What’s pretty neat about that is the ChatGPT integration can remember conversations, so in certain instances you can build workflows with a memory. Say, for example, you’re building a Zap that has ChatGPT answer questions that are posted in a specific Slack Channel. By adding a word to the memory key field, ChatGPT will remember the user’s previous conversation history and can respond accordingly to follow-up questions.

For any workflow you set up with the ChatGPT integration, you can provide it with more tailored training instructions and incorporate important company information like FAQs, writing guidelines, or other rules you want ChatGPT to incorporate into its answers. It’s a pretty handy way to instruct ChatGPT to have better conversations versus just one-time prompts

On the other hand, the OpenAI integration uses completion models (GPT-3.5-turbo-instruct) to generate text for certain actions but does not have built-in conversation memory. You might use the OpenAI integration to create outlines for blog posts or respond  to certain briefs. 

One of the main differences is that it has multiple actions which are broader and incorporate more of OpenAI’s other features like DALL·E or Whisper. That means you can send prompts to generate text, create images with DALL·E, create transcriptions with Whisper, and more within your workflows.

Build—and interact with—AI assistants in other apps

Ever wanted to have your own AI assistant that can chat with team members or customers and solve issues in other apps, like Slack or Gmail? 

These Zaps help you create anything from an accounting assistant that can answer employee questions in a specific Slack channel to an analysis assistant that can analyze blog performance or KPIs. 

And because our ChatGPT integration brings ChatGPT’s own functionality into your Zaps, you can upload your own files and have your AI assistant answer questions based on your company documents. Or it can write and execute code and analyze structured data from a CSV—the possibilities are endless! 

If you’re just starting out with ChatGPT and want to experiment with its capabilities in Slack, you don’t have to create an assistant. You can still have a conversation with ChatGPT right inside Slack when a prompt is posted in a particular channel. With this simple Zap, you and your team can easily ask questions and get responses—without leaving Slack: 

Nurture and qualify leads

For your sales and marketing teams, determining which leads are mostly likely to convert is a process that takes up valuable time and resources. 

You can use AI and automation to bridge that gap. For example, say a lead visits your pricing page or signs up for a free trial. You could use a Zap that logs this activity, and then adds these leads to relevant nurture campaigns or to your CRM with an AI-generated message or summary. Or you could use a Zap that uses AI to summarize sales calls with prospects, so your teams know who’s ready to convert. 

Generate and share content 

As a writing tool, ChatGPT is a pretty decent time-saver when it comes to generating first drafts. But with the ChatGPT integration, you can take that a step further by incorporating the creation of blog outlines, emails, and articles into your automated workflows. 

For example, you can use these Zaps to write email responses (or SMS responses) to customers based on incoming messages, then save them in your drafts folder in Gmail to review before sending. 

Or, if you need to draft customer stories based on submitted interview questions (or other key information), you can pull in the customer details from an app like Airtable or Google Forms, get the AI to write the content, then add the text to a Google Doc. 

Create prompts and code snippets from your spreadsheets

Do you and your team spend a lot of time pasting data into Google Sheets or Airtable? Whether you use these apps to log project briefs, create prompts for ChatGPT, or to store product requirements for a particular release, you can pull in the power of ChatGPT to help.

With these Zaps, any information you drop into your sheet will be automatically sent to ChatGPT. ChatGPT will then provide a response to that information (like a code snippet for a product requirement) before logging the relevant response back into the same sheet or database. 

Summarize business information

You can also use AI to generate summaries of important information that is fed into your company. Because who has the time to process it all?

For example, you could generate summaries of every new job applicant that applies through your company’s recruitment page (replete with each applicant’s qualifications) to save your HR team time. Or, you could do the same thing for prospects stored in your sales CRM. 

Alternatively, you can even extract key information from short PDFs, articles, and other business information. 

Streamline customer communication  

From responding to glowing reviews to answering questions on your social platforms—every interaction with your audience counts. 

But meeting them on every platform isn’t always easy—especially if you’re a smaller team or need to focus your resources elsewhere. 

With these Zaps, you can automatically reply to online reviews, answer questions on your social platforms, and even schedule weekly posts on LinkedIn so your customers feel heard. By creating personalized experiences, you can enhance user experiences, improve customer support, and ultimately get valuable insights into your business.

Manage projects and tasks

We’ve all been there: Someone asks you to do something in Slack or via email, but you forget to add it to your project management tool. 

While automation can send these requests straight to an app, AI can do things like provide more context on the request, add titles and descriptions, and format each request in an easily digestible way, so your to-do list never slips through the cracks. 

Get event reminders and prioritize your workload

Keeping track of important events throughout the day while your to-dos pile up is no joke. Whether you’d like it to help you prioritize your workload based on your to-do lists or projects outlined in your project management tool, ChatGPT is excellent at breaking down your day into manageable chunks. 

You can even build workflows that will pull information from Google Calendar events and create a reminder of what you need to do (or read) before the meeting happens. 

Make ChatGPT work for you

Whatever you’re already using ChatGPT for, you can harness its power and deliver more value to your business with the ChatGPT integration. 

Whether you want to build ChatGPT Slack bots to introduce the value of AI to your team or you just want ChatGPT to take care of the tedious parts of content creation, this integration is key to maximizing your productivity and efficiency. 

And remember: Zapier supports thousands of apps, so you can automate almost any task at work. 

This article was originally published in May 2023. It was most recently updated in April 2024.

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