Automations vs. AI - which is better for growing your business?

For years I've been involved in designing and building automations for clients including billion-dollar brands. But recently, I've started to explore the different ways AI can be used to help business owners, sales managers and marketing managers close more sales and grow a business.

In this first edition of the 'Find Your Freedom' newsletter, I'm going to do a comparison between Automation and AI.

What are Automations?

Automations are structured flows with 3 distinct phases (trigger, action, endpoint) and this is something I recently shared in a workshop for a group of female business owners.

The triggers tell us what causes the automation to start, the action nodes get the automation to "do something" and then once a contact record has gone through each of the steps in the automation they reach the end and we decide what to do with them.

The great thing about automations is that we can make them really complex, like the 50 I designed, built and tested for a streaming platform like Netflix, or we can keep them really simple, like a 4-email Welcome Series.

You may have received reminders about bill payments being due, that someone's birthday is coming up, or you've registered for something and received a discount coupon. These are all simple automations working in the background.

Automations enable us to create structured and repeatable flows we can use with people in our ecosystem, like leads and customers, to remove manual actions (like sending a follow-up email after a call) that take time away from other items on the "to do" list.

And I'm guilty of making my "to do" list as long as my arm, so if you're like me, creating automations can be a way to cross off some of those items and never have to think about them again.

As automations have a structured flow that we create, they also become easier to adjust and update. Perhaps we want to change the words in an email that is sent when someone registers, or we want to add another tag to the contact record so we know more about them based on the behaviour they've shown. This is all possible within an automation.

Other common automations include "Abandon Cart" and "Reactivation".

Abandon Cart is something you'll probably have experienced if you shop online - you'll have added some items to your cart but don't immediately checkout and then an hour, maybe a day later, you'll receive a notification to come back and complete your order or purchase.

This is an automation - it waits to check if you've completed your purchase, and if you haven't, it will send you an automatic reminder by email, SMS or push notification.

A Reactivation automation will check to see if a contact record in your ecosystem has taken a desired action, like engaging with your emails or making a purchase, and if they haven't the automation will send a gentle nudge, perhaps several nudges, to try and reactivate someone.

In ecommerce, this might be a "come back and get 20% off your next order" type of message. For other sales environments, where there is a quarterly target to hit, it might be a message about no setup costs. Car dealerships often run promotions at different times of year. It is likely they will send these promotions to people already in their database (old or stagnant leads) in a bid to reactivate them.

And the great thing about automations like this is that once they are built they can keep running indefinitely. They don't need to eat or sleep.

But if automations are so great and we can create simple and complex structured flows and design them specifically for our unique businesses where is the debate?

AI is continuing to develop at a rapid pace and those who don't embrace it will be left behind.

The evolving power of AI

There was a period of about 8 months where I didn't want to touch AI. As someone coming from a more traditional "systems and automation" background I thought it was against everything I'd spent years doing for clients.

But finally, I gave in and started using ChatGPT. At first it was to just check things, ask questions and get some insights. Then I started to ask it to help me with content ideas. Now, I've started to see how different AI tools can be used to support business owners like you and me, to grow our businesses in completely new ways.

There are AI tools and platforms for creating images at scale (I've used one and then got ChatGPT to automatically crop and resize the images to give me different versions). An automation can't do that.

There are tools that can clone your voice and clone your images so you can create videos in a fraction of the time (I'm using two tools like this to help me with content creation). An automation can't do this.

There are tools, platforms and plugins that leverage services like ChatGPT and Claude to act as guides and mentors.

There are tools and platforms you can use for getting AI to create adverts for your products and services.

And the speed of change is only going to increase.

Failure to embrace AI now can leave your business scrambling around and struggling to grow in the years to come.

So which is better - Automations or AI?

Although this is the core question I asked for this newsletter I don't think it's a simple or straight answer.

Automations give us the ability to create structured flows for repeatable tasks and even if you use more complex tools like Zapier, Make or n8n those are still automations.

We can make automations really simple or really complex and for certain elements of our business an automation will be the best tool for the job.

On the other hand, AI is enabling us to create and use a completely new set of tools for our business - like the creation of videos, voice clones, adverts and more.

It will come down to deciding the business goal and which tool is right for the task in front of us.

But when it comes to sales, generating more revenue and growing a business there's a new way of thinking about all of this.

AI Assistants.

AI Assistants use the best of both sides.

AI is used for some of the creativity. Automation is used for a structured flow.

An example would be getting AI to write a daily script for a short-form video which is something I'm exploring.

The automation would trigger each day, send the request to something like ChatGPT with a specific prompt so that the script is in my style, ChatGPT would create the script and send back to the automation. The automation will then trigger an email and send me the script.

This is a very basic example of how AI and Automation can work together to create an assistant.

But how does that work for generating more sales and growing a business?

AI Assistants can help us nurture leads, reactivate old leads, provide customer support and be used in several other ways, and that's what I'll be diving into in my next newsletter.

However, if you don't want to wait until then, I've created an overview document of the 5 AI Assistants I'm exploring for my personal business. You can grab it for free at https://www.fyfclub.com

Automations are here to stay, but AI will enable us to do more, more quickly, and with greater creativity than we've ever done before.

If your business has repeatable tasks or flows of communication with a lead/customer, these could be turned into automations and save you hours per week.

If you've got a sales team and sales process, AI Assistants could be used to do some of the back-and-forth, qualification process and appointment booking.

It all really comes down to picking the right tool for the right job. Automation will win in some of those, AI will win in others.

And for sales - AI Assistants will be the best of both worlds.