To find ways to automate our work with AI and other technologies, we talk about how our team spends their time and what kinds of manual, time-consuming tasks we do. We realized that we were spending hours a week copying and pasting data from emails into our database of profiles.
One of us would receive an email from someone, and we’d want to save that person’s information in our database. We’d copy and paste the person’s first name, last name, email, phone number, and more into our database. We’d download any attachments and save those. We’d copy the body of the email and save that. We’d even tag the person based on our taxonomy. It was time-consuming, boring work.
We decided to test if automation with AI could do the job for us. We knew that a good use case for AI was structuring unstructured data, but this seemed like a difficult task. The AI would have to read emails, which have some consistent structure but can also vary significantly, pick out the correct contact information, and put it into the right format.
We started by testing the idea in an AI chat interface. We fed in prompts that explained the task and included full emails and the desired output format. We realized pretty quickly that this was going to work well. Finding the right prompt required many iterations, but we eventually got there. At this point, we’re at almost 100% accuracy.
We learned that AI is a vital part of the job, but using regular old software to prepare the data by removing and changing certain content helped the AI work much better. Don’t over-rely on AI when regular code can do a job or make AI’s job easier.
We’re now saving many hours a week. Instead of a human doing all that work manually, a human forwards the email to our computer Assistant. The Assistant does everything else and responds to the email with the steps it took. Here’s a typical response the Assistant would send:
Your new contact URL is: https://database.nu.org/contacts/373352
Actions:
• A new Contact ‘[email protected]’ was created
• A new Note was added to ‘[email protected]’
• A new Document KaganResume was added to ‘[email protected]’
We could have called the feature “Save to Database”, but a name that shortens to the initials STD might not be the best option, so we’ll have to find something better. Another good task for AI!
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
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