The core model: triggers, actions, and AI steps

Every automation, on every platform, is built from the same few pieces. Learn this model once and you can build anything — and read any tutorial regardless of which tool it uses.

1. Trigger — what starts the automation. The event that kicks it off: a new email arrives, a form is submitted, a schedule fires (every morning at 8am), a new row is added, a webhook is received, a new CRM record is created. Every automation begins with exactly one trigger.

2. Actions — what it does. The steps that follow: create a spreadsheet row, send a Slack message, update a CRM record, create a task, send an email. A workflow chains actions across your connected apps.

3. AI steps — where judgment happens. The new primitive: an AI step inserted mid-flow that reasons over your data. Five durable "verbs" cover almost everything you'll want AI to do:

• Summarize — long email/thread → three bullets.
• Classify — route by topic, urgency, or sentiment ("is this a complaint or a question?").
• Extract — pull structured fields from unstructured text (invoice number, name, amount from a PDF).
• Generate — draft a reply, a post, a description.
• Decide / route — choose the branch or next action.

4. Logic between steps — the glue. Filters ("only continue if the amount is over $500"), paths/branches (do different things based on a condition), loops (repeat for each item), delays, and formatters (reshape data). These are deterministic and cheap.

The key design principle that will save you money and grief: do as much as possible with cheap deterministic logic, and reserve AI steps for genuine judgment. Don't use an AI step to check if a number is over 500 — a filter does that for free. Use AI for the things only AI can do: understanding language, classifying messy input, generating text. This keeps automations fast, cheap, and reliable.

How apps connect without code: the platform maintains pre-built connectors to each app's API and handles the login (OAuth) for you. You just map fields visually — "put the email's sender into the spreadsheet's 'From' column" — by pointing and clicking. When no connector exists, there's a generic HTTP/webhook step as an escape hatch (a bit more advanced, still no real coding).

That's the entire model: a trigger starts it, actions do things, AI steps add judgment, and logic glues it together — with the platform handling the app connections. Every automation in this course, and every one you'll ever build, is some arrangement of these pieces. Hold this model in your head and the rest is just practice.