Getting Started
7 AI Automations I Use Every Day to Run My Business
A fast tour of the seven automations that keep this business moving without anyone doing the work by hand. Nothing here is aspirational; each one runs on a real account. Competitors get watched for new posts and site changes, inbound leads get enriched with company and job details before anyone opens the CRM, common email types get answered, incoming mail gets sorted and categorized, new blog articles get posted to Facebook, every video call turns into an updated to-do list with a summary, and the Hacker News front page arrives in the inbox each morning. Most of them are Zapier-style workflow steps rather than AI agents, so they cost nothing to run. The point of the list is not any single automation but the pattern: any repeating piece of your day that starts with a trigger and ends with a predictable action is a candidate.
Step by step
- 01
Monitor competitors for new posts and site changes
Point a workflow at the pages you care about and have it check on a schedule. You hear about a competitor's pricing change or new launch because a workflow noticed, not because you remembered to look.
- 02
Enrich CRM leads with company and job details
When a lead lands, the workflow looks up who they are and where they work and writes it back to the CRM record. The person doing outreach opens a filled-in record instead of a name and an email address.
- 03
Auto-respond to common email types
The messages that always get the same answer stop reaching you. Pricing questions, availability requests, and standard inbound all get handled by an agent that knows how you'd answer.
- 04
Sort and categorize incoming email
Mail gets labeled and routed as it arrives, so what's left in front of you is the mail that actually needs a person. This is the workflow most people turn on first.
- 05
Post new blog articles to Facebook
Publishing a post is the trigger; the social version writes itself and goes out. Distribution stops depending on whether anyone remembered to do it after hitting publish.
- 06
Turn every video call into a to-do list and summary
Each call produces a summary and an updated task list. You leave the meeting with the follow-ups already captured rather than reconstructing them from memory an hour later.
- 07
Send the Hacker News front page to your inbox
A scheduled digest brings the front page to you at a fixed time. It replaces the habit of checking a site repeatedly with one message you read once.
Ready to automate your busywork?
Carly schedules, researches, and briefs you—so you can focus on what matters.
See what people say
"Before Carly, I relied on a Calendly link, but the whole process felt impersonal and not very professional. Carly changed that by handling all the back-and-forth, so I'm no longer stuck in endless email threads trying to line up schedules.
Now Carly reaches out to candidates, shares my real-time availability, lets them pick a slot, then sends a Zoom link and drops it straight into my calendar. She sends reminders to both of us before each call, which has significantly reduced no-shows and last-minute confusion.
On top of scheduling, Carly acts like a full executive assistant, sending me my schedule the night before so I can prepare for each call. It reminds me of the old x.ai assistant, but Carly is noticeably smarter, faster, and better suited to my healthcare recruitment business."