How to adapt and customize existing AI workflow templates for your specific needs
Jacob Bank shows how to adapt AI workflow templates - a different but increasingly valuable skill as more templates become available across platforms.Jacob demonstrates with a “Customer Call Insight Generator” template that creates weekly syntheses of customer meetings. The structure mirrors his previous use case: find all customer call meeting notes, consolidate them using Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and send via Slack - but weekly instead of daily.Here’s Jacob’s approach to working with templates:First, review what the template does before importing. On the template page, you’ll see an outline of the workflow and what each step accomplishes. When you hit “Use this template,” it prompts you to connect any necessary tools (calendar, Slack, etc.) that aren’t already connected.Second, look for steps that need setup. Jacob notes: “Once you’ve imported the template, it can feel a bit intimidating because you have a bunch of pre-configured steps that you didn’t create yourself.” Start by clicking any steps flagged as requiring setup - in this case, selecting which Slack channel should receive the reports.Third, understand each step’s configuration. Check the trigger timing (this one runs Saturdays at 8 AM for weekly summaries). Verify the email search criteria - it’s looking for “Your Meeting Recap” from Fireflies. Jacob emphasizes: “If you use a different AI notetaker with a different subject line, you’d want to change this - otherwise, it won’t find any emails and the workflow won’t work.”Fourth, customize the AI prompt for your needs. The template prompt says “Please review the attached meeting summaries and write a consolidated report,” then asks for specific analysis: customer information, use cases, what they like/dislike, other tools they’ve tried. Jacob adds his own requirement: “how savvy are they with AI and automation tools?”Fifth, test before activating. Run each step to ensure it finds the right data in your environment. Only then toggle it on for automatic weekly execution.Jacob’s key insight: “Importing a template can sometimes be harder than starting from scratch because you have to understand what someone else created. Templates provide great inspiration and get you started with the configuration, but you still need to take the time to make sure they’re doing what you want.”➡️ Templates accelerate setup but aren’t plug-and-play. Take time to understand each step, customize for your tools and needs, then test thoroughly before automating.