An Automated Workflow Made Possible by ChatGPT

ChatGPT can be very useful in workflow automation. Below is an example workflow that is difficult to do before, but now made easy by ChatGPT. This workflow is like an assistant to an accountant in processing reimbursement requests. It has the following steps:

• Receive email
• Ask ChatGPT if this email is about a reimbursement request
• If it is about a reimbursement request, ask ChatGPT to get break-down information for inserting into an accounting system
• Ask ChatGPT to write a reply to the email, including the total amount
• Send the above result to confirm with the owner via SMS
• Wait for the owner to reply by SMS
• If the answer is affirmative, send the email reply and enter information into the accounting system and send an SMS to confirm it is done.

Some interesting points to note:

• Instead of writing detailed business logics for the workflow (usually in Python), the user now writes instructions for ChatGPT in a natural language. This is perfect for citizen coding (except that I am not sure if we should use the word "coding" here).
• Similar to coding, the instructions for ChatGPT also needs some tweaking and refinement to achieve the best results. It seems that writing good instructions for AI systems can become a useful skill in the future, just like writing good codes.
• The ChatGPT results are not 100% reliable, but that is not a show stopper in this case because there is a confirmation step by a human being. There should a lot of workflows that can tolerate this unreliability.

That's it for the article, but if you want to see some videos on how the workflow is created and how it works, here they are: