Your first AI automation, no code

The plan

1. Pick the one form where new enquiries reach you, and write down what a good first reply says.
2. Connect that form to a tool called Zapier. Add an AI step that writes the reply, and send every enquiry to one simple list.
3. For one week, the replies wait as drafts for you to read. After that, they send on their own.

Start here if you've never used AI

If you've never typed a question into ChatGPT, read this part first. It takes three minutes.

What an AI chatbot is. It's a website or app where you type a request in normal words, and it types an answer back. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Microsoft Copilot are the best known. You can ask it to write an email, explain a confusing letter, or turn messy notes into a tidy list. It writes in full sentences, like a person would.

What it's good at. Writing first drafts. Rewording things politely. Summarising long text. Following clear instructions again and again without getting bored.

What it's bad at. Knowing facts about your business that nobody told it. Saying "I don't know". When it doesn't know something, it often makes up an answer that sounds right. People call this being "confidently wrong", and it's the most important thing to remember. You fix it by giving it the facts and telling it to use only those.

What an automation is. An automation is a rule that does a step for you when something happens. "When a new enquiry arrives, send a reply and add it to my list." You set the rule up once, and it runs every time, day or night. If you've ever done a mail merge in Word, it's the same idea, except it runs by itself each time a new entry arrives.

What an AI automation is. An automation where one of the steps is the AI writing something. In this guide, the AI writes the reply to each enquiry. The other steps are plain rules: copy this, send that, add a row.

Try this now (5 minutes). Go to chatgpt.com or claude.ai and make a free account. Paste this in, fill in the brackets, and press Enter:

I run a small [TYPE OF BUSINESS] in [CITY]. A customer emailed asking: "Do you do [SERVICE] and how soon could you come?" Write a short, friendly reply. We do offer that service. The earliest we can visit is [DAY].

Read what comes back. Then ask again, but leave out the last two sentences (the facts). The second reply will guess or stay vague. That's the whole lesson: the AI is only as good as the facts you give it.

Words you'll see

1. What you're building

Someone fills in the contact form on your website at 9:15 on a Tuesday night. A few minutes later they get an email back. It uses their name. It answers the question they asked. It tells them what happens next and when. It's signed by you.

At the same moment, a new row appears in a Google Sheet with their name, contact details, what they asked, and the reply they got. You also get a short note saying a new enquiry came in.

You read it all the next morning. Nobody waited, and nothing got lost in an inbox.

Here it is as a chain:

Form filled in → AI writes a reply → Reply sent from your email → Row added to your list → Note to you

Each arrow is a step you set up by clicking and filling in boxes. You won't write code. The first version takes an afternoon. The week of reading drafts afterwards is what makes it good.

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