Using AI for fast, automated SOPs - Blog

Mike Taylor isn’t just a prompt engineer, though his prompt engineering course on Udemy has been taken by over 100,000 people.

He’s also a systems thinker with a deep background in marketing, having built the growth-hacking marketing agency Lada – and he’s passionate about optimizing workflows with AI.

When Mike was growing Lada, he found that training new recruits took a ton of time. Now, he’s come up with a brilliant, time-saving way to create standard operating procedures (SOPs) based on calls with team members.

In a recent live workshop, he ran us through his process, using a combination of AI tools like Grain and ChatGPT along with workflow automation platform, Zapier.

This session is especially useful for business owners, team leaders, and anyone looking to streamline their operational processes without spending hours on documentation.

Here's a peek into Mike's powerful approach:

1. Automating SOP creation from call transcripts

Like many business owners, Mike realized a huge amount of his time was spent on the repetitive training and development of new employees.

As Mike explained, “A lot of this really interesting information that you have on calls is completely lost as soon as you hang up. And what I wanted to do was really figure out how to capture that. in a repository of some sort.”

His solution? He uses Grain, an AI tool that records calls and provides transcripts, which are then “zapped” into Google Drive with Zapier.

From there, ChatGPT takes over, creating structured SOPs based on the call’s contents.

Mike emphasized that the real magic happens when the AI extracts actionable steps from unstructured conversations, creating an SOP that anyone can follow … without anyone in the company needing to sit down and write it.

As Mike said, “AI is just really good at this. It's just great at being able to take an unstructured document and add some structure to it.”

2. Building scalable workflows with Zapier and ChatGPT

The backbone of Mike’s process is Zapier, a tool that can connect a huge number of different apps and automate workflows.

In the workshop, he walked us through a step-by-step example of how he built the automation using Grain and Google Drive. After each call is recorded, Zapier puts the transcript into Google Docs, then hands it over to ChatGPT, which is instructed to create a step-by-step SOP.

Mike explained how you can add even more value to this process by bringing in extra information from Grain, such as the recording ID in case two calls have the same title.

“If I have another call with that same title, it's not going to be unique and it might mess things up and like delete the previous one.”

He also suggested that if you use tags within Grain, you could use the tags to refine your workflow, too. For instance, you could convert calls tagged “training” into SOPs but ignore calls tagged “client”.

3. Improving SOP efficiency with structured prompts

When it came to engineering the prompt for ChatGPT, Mike had some fantastic advice on getting the results you’re looking for.

He used “chain of thought” prompting to significantly improve his results, getting ChatGPT to plan ahead before creating the SOP.

Crucially, he also asked the AI to create an SOP that anyone in the team could follow, even if they’d not been on the call. That way, the AI won’t assume the reader already knows information from the call.

Mike offered some advanced tips, too, like adjusting the “temperature” (creativity) of the AI to make it slightly less creative, as it’ll be following the structure of pre-existing content in creating the SOP.

4. Helping your team find the SOPs they need with a custom GPT

Another great idea Mike shared was to create a custom GPT to help make your SOPs accessible to your team. If you have hundreds of SOPs in Google Drive, your team might struggle to find them: he gave the example of someone searching for “search term report” instead of “search query report” and not finding the SOP they needed.

Creating a custom GPT lets your team get the specific instructions they need, by quickly locating the SOP and giving the instructions that match what a team member is looking for.

In the Q&A section of the workshop, he recommended telling the custom GPT to “always search your knowledge for the relevant SOP and only use information from those SOPs in your answer.” That way, you’ll avoid ChatGPT hallucinating facts or drawing on other information.

Mike’s workshop was a masterclass in leveraging AI for operational efficiency. His use of Zapier and ChatGPT to automate SOPs is ideal for businesses that are hiring fast and don’t want to waste hours going through the same training material over and over again.

Want to learn more?

If you’re interested in implementing AI-driven automation for SOPs or any kind of documents based on calls, Mike's full session will show you how. You can watch his step-by-step demo (available to Pro Ben’s Bites members) here:

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Written by Ali Luke.