How to Build Your First Zap with an AI Step

A Zap is just a trigger plus one or more actions. Zapier ships a built-in AI by Zapier app that can run a prompt against an LLM as one of those actions, so you can drop intelligence into any workflow without an API key of your own. In this guide you will build a Zap where every new email gets summarized by AI and the summary lands in a Slack channel.

What you need

• A free or paid Zapier account
• A Gmail (or Outlook) account to use as the trigger
• A Slack workspace where you can post to a channel
• About 10 minutes

Step 1: Create a new Zap and pick a trigger

From the Zapier dashboard click Create, then Zaps. For the trigger, search for Gmail and choose the New Email event. Connect your Gmail account and pick the label or inbox you want to watch, then test the trigger so Zapier pulls a real sample email to work with.

Step 2: Add the AI by Zapier action

Click the plus under the trigger to add an action. Search for AI by Zapier and choose the Analyze and Return Data action (sometimes shown as Extract or Summarize). This action sends your prompt to a hosted model and gives you the response back as a usable field.

Step 3: Write the prompt with mapped fields

In the prompt box, type your instruction and insert data from the trigger by clicking the field tags. Pull in the email Subject and Body Plain so the model has the full message to work with. Keep the instruction short and specific.

Summarize the email below in 2 sentences, then on a new
line write one of: ACTION NEEDED, FYI, or SPAM.

Subject: {{Subject}}

Body:
{{Body Plain}}

Step 4: Send the result to Slack

Add a final action, choose Slack, and pick Send Channel Message. Connect Slack, select your channel, and in the message text map the output field from the AI step. Run a final test to confirm the summary posts. Once it works, turn the Zap on.

Result: A new email arrives, the AI step reads the subject and body, and within a minute Slack shows a tidy two-sentence summary tagged ACTION NEEDED, FYI, or SPAM so you can triage your inbox at a glance.