There's no getting around the fact that, in the age of digital speed, efficiency and innovation are everything. This is why businesses and individuals alike are looking for ways to do things faster, with less 'hands-on' work, and with far less redundancy.12 This is exactly why artificial intelligence tools have become so popular. By automating repetitive tasks, it's possible to improve productivity and save ample amounts of time.3 Whether you're getting smart with your digital customer service or generating better content, AI-driven automation is changing the way many of us work.45

Let's look at some of the best AI-powered services for automation and see how they can help you up your game in terms of productivity and responsiveness.67

One of the most popular automation tools around is Zapier, which connects your favorite apps and automates the boring stuff1. Zapier allows you to build automated workflows, called 'Zaps', that connect two different apps to automate tasks without the need to code2. Zapier integrates with over 3,000 apps, such as Slack, Google Sheets, and Trello, and can automate tasks that would usually require input from you, such as moving data between platforms or automatically sending emails if you're mentioned on social media34. Zapier can save you a ton of hours each week by automating simple tasks like these5.

If you're wondering what RPA is, the first thing to understand is that it is not about automating apps. Apps are the software you run to perform a particular task – your email software, for example, or your accounting software, or the app that runs the robots on the factory floor.1

UiPath is a widely used RPA platform. It offers a large set of tools that allow organizations to automate their business processes. These are often fairly complex and might need to perform multiple 'activities' on different computer systems to complete a task – for example, extracting data from a sales-order program, validating the data, and inputting it in an invoicing program.2 UiPath can be used to automate tasks like invoice managing – where human-entered data, such as reading invoice data and entering into an accounting system, can instead be carried out by a UiPath bot, which reads invoice data using OCR (optical character recognition), enters the data, and triggers payment processing – all without a human intervening.1 The most powerful thing UiPath can do is work with unstructured data, meaning it can read and work with documents, emails – even image files. And that's its most compelling selling point for businesses looking to reduce mistakes and increase the speed of operations.2

Grammarly is an AI-powered writing assistant that offers comprehensive language improvement features. The tool provides real-time suggestions for grammar, punctuation, style, and tone, making it invaluable for content creators, marketers, and business professionals12. Grammarly's versatility is evident in its compatibility with various platforms, including Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Outlook, and Gmail, ensuring users can maintain high-quality writing across different mediums34.

• Offers grammar, spelling, and punctuation checks

• Provides style and tone suggestions

• Compatible with multiple writing platforms

• Premium version includes advanced features like sentence structure improvement and vocabulary enhancement

• Detects plagiarism and offers citation suggestions56

Grammarly's AI-driven approach often surpasses human editors in catching errors, making it a significant time-saver for large content projects7. The tool's ability to adapt to various writing contexts and provide tailored suggestions helps users create more readable, concise, and professional content8.

Jasper (formerly Jarvis) is an AI-powered writing assistant to help you write better and faster. Whether for a blog post, a product description or copy for social media, Jasper leverages AI to create content for you12. One of Jasper's best features is its versatility in tone and style, and this makes it well-suited to a wide range of sectors and audiences. It's a tool that can be of great value to any business wanting to scale out its content without sacrificing quality3. So for example, instead of spending 90 minutes writing an article or crafting 10 ideas for social media posts, you type up one or two key points and let Jasper do the rest4. For marketers, copywriters, and entrepreneurs who need to automate the content-creation process while keeping content as human as possible, Jasper is the perfect tool5.

Butler is Trello's built-in automation tool that enhances productivity by streamlining workflows and reducing manual tasks1. This powerful feature allows users to create rules, buttons, and commands to automate various actions within Trello boards2. With Butler, teams can set up automations such as moving cards between lists when due dates are marked complete, adding labels or members to cards, and creating recurring tasks3.

Key features of Butler include:

• Rule-based automations that trigger actions based on specific events

• Card and board buttons for one-click automation of complex tasks

• Calendar and due date commands for time-based automations

• Integration with external apps like Slack and Jira for extended functionality4

Butler's no-code interface makes it accessible to all users, regardless of technical expertise, allowing teams to easily optimize their project management processes and focus on high-value work14.

HubSpot is an all-in-one, CRM-based platform that includes automation tools for email marketing, sales, and customer service. With the marketing automation features of HubSpot, you can create email sequences that deliver documents or content based on a potential customer's specific interests, schedule social media posts to be delivered at a specific time, segment and tag lists of customers or site visitors based on their demographic characteristics, and track customer relationships and interactions in a single location.12 For instance, you can implement automated email workflows that guide leads along the sales funnel depending on what they do (downloading a white paper, signing up for a newsletter), or you can use HubSpot to track customer interactions so that your sales team always has the latest information about prospects.34

If your business uses Google Workspace (formerly G Suite), then you're probably using Gmail, Google Docs, Google Sheets, Calendar – any of the cloud-based productivity apps offered by the Silicon Valley giant. Everything you do in Google Workspace can be automated. By using a tool called Google Apps Script, you can write custom functionality to streamline your day-to-day operations.1 For example, you can automatically add values from a Google Sheet to the booking calendar on your restaurant website, set up automatic emails for overdue expense forms in your accounting system, create customized reports based on data stored in Google Drive, and so on. You can have Google Apps Script do whatever work is required to accomplish your task. And the range of potential tasks is enormous.2 Google Workspace automation can help teams cut down on training hours and organize tasks for maximum productivity.3

Microsoft Power Automate (formerly Microsoft Flow) is a similar product designed for enterprise users to automate workflows across apps and services. It can be seen as a more intricate and powerful version of Zapier. It offers integrations with a lot more apps and services, including RPA and AI actions. For instance, Power Automate helps you to automate approvals on documents, sync data between cloud services, or send automated responses to customer inquiries. It hooks into Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, and Azure, among other Microsoft tools, as well as hundreds of third-party apps. Because it can handle simple automation as well as more complex workflows, Power Automate is suitable for businesses of all sizes.

Power Automate provides a comprehensive set of tools for creating automated workflows, including a drag-and-drop interface for building flows and pre-built templates for common scenarios1. The platform supports both cloud-based and on-premises systems, allowing organizations to automate processes across their entire IT infrastructure2. With features like robotic process automation (RPA) and AI Builder, Power Automate enables users to create sophisticated automations that can handle complex tasks and decision-making processes34.

Social media management can be a huge drain on time, especially if you run a business and have to maintain multiple accounts. Hootsuite is a social media management tool that lets you schedule posts, monitor interactions, and analyze performance across your multiple accounts. With Hootsuite, you can plan and execute your social media campaigns in advance, to make sure that your content hits the right people at the right time.12 Hootsuite's automated scheduling function lets you upload posts in bulk, which are then released automatically at times you specify, while the ability to track all mentions, comments, and messages across all your accounts in one place also helps you to keep up with engagement.34 For businesses that want to stay active on social media but aren't willing to spend hours a day on the various platforms, Hootsuite is a godsend.5

With a growing need for automation in business in the short term and the long term, AI-powered automation tools are part of the cutting-edge business landscape. Whether you're focusing on automating simple tasks or complex processes, there truly are a variety of ways such tools can help you save time, cut down on mistakes, and work more effectively. From project management, content creation, marketing, and customer service (and so many more things in between), AI is changing how we work so that we can spend more time on what really matters.