You don’t have to be technical. You don’t have to be an engineer. You just need a coding agent. And if you’re a service business that’s anywhere from five to 50 people, this is perfect for you.

Do your first AI project yourself

I don’t think you should pay anyone to do your first AI project. I think it’s a terrible idea. I think you should experiment with AI first, get a sense of where it might be useful in your business.

Creating big dashboards and complex systems is not an easy task. And the coding agents are getting there, but they’re not there yet. However, there’s a few small automations that you can do right now in one afternoon. They actually move a needle in your business.

So to be frank, in a lot of audits, I see it’s pretty simple stuff that they need, whether it’s their calendar mismatch or they just want greater visibility on their emails.

They’re not sending anything for you. They’re not gonna mess up any client relations. You can build an automation in 30 minutes that texts you or emails you when a client needs attention immediately.

What the client radar does

So the first one, let’s call it client radar. It’s scanning your emails as your emails are coming in. It’s reading the message, determining if it’s one of the thousand of spam emails that you probably get every day or if it’s actual client or prospect that you need to interact with and you might need to respond quickly to.

I find this automation to be extremely useful. My inbox is full of junk, full of people soliciting. And honestly, cutting through that noise is a huge time saver for me.

I remember this time when I got an email from a potential prospect and he wanted to meet that afternoon, but I didn’t get to see the email until three or four hours later. And by that time, it’s too late, possibly losing the sale.

You want to make sure that everyone on your team is receiving their emails properly. Having a dedicated alert system to a Slack channel or to you specifically through an app like Google Chat, that will be extremely helpful. And potentially you’re not missing out on a single client, especially if you’re a service business.

The flow

So here’s what the flow basically looks like. Email comes in, Gmail sends it to your workflow.

So use your coding agent of choice. You have your CRM. You want to connect your email to your coding agent. The coding agent will summarize the email. Once it’s summarized, it will connect to your CRM to check the sender.

If the sender is an existing client or a prospect that you’ve been reaching out to, it sets it for high alert. You get a notification if it meets those conditions.

Option one: n8n

A pretty good see what’s happening solution for this would be n8n, which is essentially a workflow flowchart no code platform. It has a Gmail node, so it will receive every Gmail that you get once you connect your account to it.

And once you do that, you will have it summarized by an AI and you will summarize using a OpenAI, Gemini API key or Fireworks AI, which is what I use. And it has a zero data retention policy if you care about privacy.

If the sender is lining up with your CRM, which is your prospects and your leads, then that will be automatic grounds for a red flag. If it’s a red flag, it will alert you through Slack or through Google Chat.

Option two: Claude

How would I accomplish this with Claude? It’s a little bit more technical. But honestly, Claude’s doing all the work.

So what I would specifically do is set up a listener. So this listener is always running on your computer. So as long as your computer’s on, it’ll be always running.

You’re going to set up a listener to listen for any new emails. Any new emails that come in that aren’t from a rejection list that I would set up to avoid calling your Claude every five to ten minutes. Maybe you can filter for the word unsubscribe at the bottom, which is what I do.

Claude will read the email, determine the priority of that email, and then it can actually ping you on Slack, ping you on Teams, or text you or email you individually.

Which one to pick

I’d say that’s a more technical and a little more crude version of it. I think n8n here is great because you can have it always running on the cloud and it’s more reliable than having to rely on your computer to be on.

It should be more than enough to get you started.