Is your Next Teammate a Zapier AI Agent ?
The article discusses automating email tasks using Zapier AI Agents to streamline candidate screenings, summarize applications, and send responses.
If you’re like me and often feel flooded by a huge number of work or personal emails, you’ve probably also considered automating some of those tasks.
I recently introduced one simple way to do this using standard tools with Apple Mail and Claude AI. The use case was very straightforward: summarizing incoming job applications (I’m the hiring manager) in a table and filtering out candidates who don’t meet my requirements.
You can read more about it here:
This time, we’re going to take this process to an entirely new level. Now I want a daily or weekly digest, and I also want to not only filter matching candidates but respond to them with either a refusal or an invitation for an interview.
For this, I’ll use a new feature in Zapier called AI Agents. There’s a lot of information out there about it. In short, this feature lets you describe what the AI should do in everyday language—unlike Make.com or other tools where you have to define a detailed workflow (with loops, conditional branches, etc.).
The real power comes from having access to a wide range of API actions—whether it’s Gmail, Notion, or SharePoint. The possibilities are enormous.
---
The Idea:
- Create a daily, weekly, or biweekly trigger that pulls in all applications from the past day.
- Summarize them and send a daily digest of the entries that interest us (omitting all irrelevant applications).
- (Optional) Reply to every email with either a refusal or an invitation.
Zapier AI Agents bring flexible, context-aware automation to the Zapier platform, bridging the gap between human-like understanding and traditional rule-based workflows. By leveraging natural language processing and robust integration capabilities, these Agents can interpret complex triggers, analyze data from connected apps, and make intelligent decisions. They reduce the need for coding expertise by enabling users to specify instructions in everyday language. Tasks such as triaging emails, responding to support inquiries, and managing sales outreach become seamless, as AI Agents handle nuanced cases and adapt to evolving conditions.
---
How it Works in a Nutshell:
As mentioned in the introduction, Zapier AI Agents let you describe the job in simple language—something like: “Get emails from today, summarize them, and send me an email.” All you need to worry about is specifying the actions involved in that job. An action is basically any interaction with an external system. In our example, we’ll use Gmail for reading emails and also Gmail for sending emails. In other scenarios, the action could be creating a task in Trello or whatever you need to do.
In addition to tasks, there are also data sources, which can give more context to your Zapier Agent (for example, a CRM or Notion notes). However, this tutorial only covers tasks.
