Make a weekly report that drafts itself

A trigger, some steps and a pause

An automation tool such as Zapier or Make does two things: it waits for a trigger (an event, or a time like Monday at 8am), then runs a list of steps in order. “AI in the middle” just means one of those steps sends text to an AI model with instructions you wrote once, and passes its answer to the next step.

A weekly report fits on five lines:

• Trigger: every Monday, an hour after your sales or bookings data is updated.
• Step 1: read a small summary tab in your spreadsheet.
• Step 2: an AI step turns those numbers into a short draft, following your saved instructions.
• Step 3: email the draft, marked DRAFT, to one person.
• Pause: that person checks it and sends it on. Nothing reaches the team automatically.

Let the spreadsheet do the math

Don’t send the AI step hundreds of raw rows and ask for totals. Models can misread long tables and slip on arithmetic, and you can’t see how they got a number. Build a summary tab instead: five to eight numbers you care about, each with this week, the week before and the change, all worked out by formulas.

The AI step then only puts those few cells into words. Every number in the draft traces to a cell, checking takes a minute, and far less of your data leaves the spreadsheet.

One instruction matters more than the rest: don’t explain why a number moved. Ask an AI for a reason and it will often offer a plausible one (the weather, a holiday) whether or not it’s true. Reasons come from a person who knows.

The three questions every automation answers

Before anything runs on its own, write down who approves, what happens if nobody does, and how you’ll know it broke. For a bakery’s weekly sales report:

• Who approves: the owner reads the draft, checks each number against the summary tab, and forwards it to the team.
• If nobody does: the draft waits. The team gets nothing rather than something unchecked, and a backup gets a reminder at noon.
• How you’ll know it broke: the owner expects the draft by 9am, so no draft means checking the tool’s run history (its record of every run). Turn on the tool’s error emails and send them to a named person.
• The quiet failure: someone renames a tab or moves a column, and the automation reads the wrong cells without any error. The owner’s number check is what catches it.

Run it alongside before you switch

For the first two weeks, write the report the old way too, and compare. Switch over when the drafts need only light edits. If you keep making the same edit, add it to the instructions. Keep the old way written down for the week the automation fails.