https://zapier.com/blog A blog about productivity, workflow automation, company building and how to get things done with less work. Fri, 30 Oct 2026 01:12:38 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/ai-models-on-zapier Staying up to date on the latest AI models is like trying to keep my house vacuumed in the height of my dog's shedding season (a losing battle). New AI models drop practically every week, and it's not exactly obvious which ones deserve a spot in your workflows. This guide is your cheat sheet, with every model you can automate on Zapier right now, sorted by provider. If you just want to cut to the chase and find out which model you should be using for which task, that's what AutomationBench is fo Nicole Replogle Thu, 29 Oct 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/ai-models-on-zapier https://zapier.com/blog/best-ai-project-management-tools When was the last time you looked at your project management app and didn't get a stress level spike? No matter how much you plan or reprioritize, it always feels like running a sprint on a tightrope. But now that AI is in the game, we can pass that stress over to the robots. With AI being added to almost every app in existence, we've seen a surge in AI project management tools. There's still no replacing the human project manager, but AI project management apps can help things move more smoothl Miguel Rebelo Thu, 29 Oct 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/best-ai-project-management-tools https://zapier.com/blog/automate-google-ai-studio Anyone who lives in the Google ecosystem has probably used Gemini for a quick draft or a fast answer. (Or if you're like me, you've been driven to your limit by the Google Docs popups encouraging you to use AI whenever your cursor strays too close to the bottom of the screen.) But a chat window is just the beginning of what Gemini can do. Its real power shows up when you connect it to the rest of your apps and let it do work on your behalf. Gemini's models are available in Zapier, so you can add Nicole Replogle Thu, 29 Oct 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/automate-google-ai-studio https://zapier.com/blog/best-ai-presentation-maker The days of spending hours dragging images to just the right place on a slide are far behind us. You can now create a presentation with AI, giving the robots the job of setting the structure, adding the initial content, and executing on the aesthetics of your deck. All you have to do is tweak it with your information, human insights, and flair—and rehearse it a bit before the big performance. I spent a month testing all the best presentation software, focusing on the ones that use AI in a way t Miguel Rebelo Thu, 29 Oct 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/best-ai-presentation-maker https://zapier.com/blog/how-does-chatgpt-work I've been writing about AI since before most people knew what it stood for, so a question as simple as "What is ChatGPT?" should be a softball. But as OpenAI has kept pushing ChatGPT forward with new models and features, it's gotten surprisingly hard to answer. ChatGPT isn't just a chatbot anymore. It's an agent harness, a coding agent, an always-on personal assistant, and a bunch of other terms that have all gotten a bit fuzzy. Here, I'll do my best to break it all down for you. Table of conte Harry Guinness Thu, 29 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/how-does-chatgpt-work https://zapier.com/blog/google-gemini Google has been in its "Gemini era" for a couple years now, and while the confusing rebrandings have slowed, everything else continues to improve at a rapid pace. Gemini is the name Google gave to its current generation family of multimodal AI models, but in typical Google fashion, it also applies to basically everything else that's related to AI. It can get a touch confusing since, by my reckoning, Google has: Google Gemini, a family of multimodal AI models. The newest is Gemini 4, though some Harry Guinness Thu, 29 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/google-gemini https://zapier.com/blog/best-llm Large language models (LLMs) are what most people think of when they think of AI. They're what you're interacting with in ChatGPT and Claude, they write the code generated by Claude Code and Codex, and they power other AI features like Google's AI answers and Apple Intelligence. If something has a chatbot, some kind of text generator or text summarization built in, or writes code or automates your computer, it almost certainly uses an LLM. LLMs have been studied in research labs since the late 2 Harry Guinness Thu, 29 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/best-llm https://zapier.com/blog/openai-playground ChatGPT can do basically anything you ask, but you really don't have a huge amount of control over its outputs. If you want to do more with OpenAI's models, you need to dig a little deeper.  If you really want to see what the models can do and exert some control over how they respond, you need to get your hands properly dirty and play around with the API. That way, you can really pull the levers that control what they can create. Here's how to go about doing it.  How to use the OpenAI playground Harry Guinness Thu, 29 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/openai-playground https://zapier.com/blog/recover-deleted-files-google-drive I'll be the first to admit that I'm a little too click-happy on the internet. Most of the time, it results in silly errors like having to go to a distant cousin's bachelorette party because I accidentally reacted to the text invite with a thumbs-up instead of a resounding "I'll pass, thanks." Other times, it results in panic. Like when I accidentally delete an important file in Google Drive. If you're reading this article, I suspect it's because you're in a similar panic mode. If you recently de Jessica Lau Thu, 29 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/recover-deleted-files-google-drive https://zapier.com/blog/ai-cost-management Does $5,000 in AI spend equal $5,000 in value? If it does, that's a bad investment. A 1x return wouldn't get approved anywhere else in our budget, and AI doesn't get an exception. As the Chief Operating Officer at Zapier, the question I really care about is whether that investment returned more than it cost. But you can't calculate that without seeing the spend, so that's the part we fixed first. When we initially rolled out AI tools across the organization, everyone got open access, and we meas Ryan Roccon Thu, 29 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/ai-cost-management https://zapier.com/blog/automationbench-on-specialized-intelligence-index Today, AutomationBench joins Fireworks' Specialized Intelligence Index (SII), bringing business workflow automation to a growing collection of practitioner-built benchmarks that compare AI models on real work. We're one of 32 new partners in this round, alongside teams covering fields like finance, healthcare, software, and ML research. AutomationBench measures whether an AI agent can finish a business workflow end to end across sales, marketing, operations, support, finance, and HR. Being part Tracy Lee Wed, 28 Oct 2026 07:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/automationbench-on-specialized-intelligence-index https://zapier.com/blog/hubspot-certifications When I started out as a freelance writer, I didn't have a professional background in content marketing. I not only needed to learn everything I could about my new industry, but also had to show potential clients that I was worth investing in. And after creeping on a few freelancer subreddits, I learned HubSpot certifications were exactly what I needed. But the courses you can take from HubSpot Academy go well beyond my niche—in fact, they run the gamut from marketing to sales and even web develo Kiran Shahid Wed, 28 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/hubspot-certifications https://zapier.com/blog/best-notion-alternatives Notion is a special app. Starting from an empty screen, you add notes and documents in a freeform way. Then, when the original page is too crowded, you create your first database and the possibilities explode: you can create a custom productivity system and change it as you evolve. But productivity is evolving. Knowledge management platforms need to support human teams while making room for AI agents, with automation and guardrails in place to make sure you do more work, not spend more time revi Miguel Rebelo Wed, 28 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/best-notion-alternatives https://zapier.com/blog/perplexity-ai There comes a time in every professional's life when they have to choose a favorite AI assistant. I didn't expect to pick a search engine. Someone recommended Perplexity to me as a research tool. Since I'm a content writer, I spend a lot of time checking facts and tracking down references. AI-powered search with sources I could easily inspect sounded promising, and as I used it more, I kept discovering other features that helped me get work done. Based on my experience with Perplexity, here's wh Sara J. Nguyen Wed, 28 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/perplexity-ai https://zapier.com/blog/slack-to-do-list I know the best approach to a calm, focused workday is to dive into my deepest work with as few distractions as possible. But we live on Slack at Zapier, so calm, focused, and distraction-free are hard to come by. Slack to-do lists give you a one-click way to corral chats into an organized to-do list without leaving the app. But beyond Slack's dedicated to-do list feature, here are a few other ways to create and manage a to-do list in Slack. Table of contents: How to use Slack to-dos How to use Jessica Lau Wed, 28 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/slack-to-do-list https://zapier.com/blog/tables-build-actions Originally released July 28, 2026. A new customer just placed their first order, 12 products due out Friday. Your warehouse packs from a table with one row per product, and nothing ships until every row has a check mark. If your Zap drops that order into a single record, the packer gets a paragraph instead of a checklist. Somewhere around product nine, a line gets skipped. Your new customer's first box arrives one product short. Twelve products should mean twelve rows, and now your Zap can write Joe Stych Tue, 27 Oct 2026 17:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/tables-build-actions https://zapier.com/blog/best-ai-image-generator AI image generators have been brewing (generating?) up a storm for the last few years. If you've been on social media, watched prime time news shows, or ordered from GrubHub, AI-generated images have been impossible to miss. These kinds of AI-generated images are everywhere, and sometimes you won't even realize. If you want to join in the fun, or add some AI-powered features to your business workflows, the apps on this list will give you what you're looking for. I've been writing about AI image Harry Guinness Tue, 27 Oct 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/best-ai-image-generator https://zapier.com/blog/openai-models Keeping track of all the new AI models getting released at the moment is practically a full-time job. The GPT-6 models were first released about two months after the GPT-5.6 series, which itself was released less than three months after GPT 5.5—you get the picture. I've been writing about OpenAI's models for the past few years, and it feels like every time I publish an article, another new model drops. OpenAI seems to be serious about pushing point-releases more frequently rather than waiting lo Harry Guinness Tue, 27 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/openai-models https://zapier.com/blog/what-is-figma There's a chance that I may have once stretched the truth about my Figma proficiency only to have my skills tested in real time—in front of a team of designers. (How you're imagining that went is exactly how it went.) Not a shining career moment by any stretch of the imagination, but one of those "it made me who I am today" bits where I can now confidently—and honestly—say that I can whip you up a basic wireframe in Figma if you needed one. (How aesthetically pleasing that wireframe would look i Jessica Lau Tue, 27 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/what-is-figma https://zapier.com/blog/google-forms-vs-surveymonkey Google Forms and SurveyMonkey are leaders in their category for different reasons: one is a simple form tool that nearly everyone already has free access to, and the other has been the poster child for survey creation for over two decades. SurveyMonkey, despite its cuddly name, has evolved into a distinctly corporate tool focused on things like market research, Net Promoter Score surveys, and brand health tracking. Google Forms, meanwhile, is hugely popular for sending out free forms and surveys Ryan Kane Tue, 27 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/google-forms-vs-surveymonkey https://zapier.com/blog/gmail-vs-apple-mail Gmail and Apple Mail are two of the most-used email apps, but there's a key distinction between them. While the former is a full-fledged email provider, the latter is more popular as a client app, where you can toggle between multiple accounts. The Gmail email service sends and receives emails. You can then use any of the Gmail email clients—the web app, iOS app, and Android app—to access it, or you can use a different, third-party email client, like Outlook or Spark. Apple Mail is just an ema Shubham Agarwal Tue, 27 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/gmail-vs-apple-mail https://zapier.com/blog/cron-job A new Culver's opened up in my neighborhood, and to say I'm stoked is putting it mildly. Although I live in Colorado, I'm a Midwestern girl at heart. Each location offers a rotating flavor of the day, and I try to never miss the devil's food cake. I could sign up for the monthly newsletter, pick up a paper calendar in-store, or check the website every day, but in addition to being inefficient, none of those offer a real-time alert to get my devil's food cake. I took matters into my own hands and Maddy Osman Mon, 26 Oct 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/cron-job https://zapier.com/blog/landing-page-examples Any time I publish a landing page, I'm immediately thinking about what I could do next to make it better. How can I optimize the page to pull in more visitors? What new things can I add to see if we can improve conversions? Managing a successful landing page involves constantly testing new ideas, keeping an eye on the data, and adapting to whatever seems to resonate with your target audience. It's the beauty (or the drag, depending on how you look at it!) of online marketing. To inspire your nex Katie Paterson Mon, 26 Oct 2026 05:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/landing-page-examples https://zapier.com/blog/gemini-omni It feels like it was only last week when spotting an AI-generated video was easy peasy. All you had to do was look for the very obvious tells—like when a dog spawned a mysterious fifth limb mid-run or crowds of people walked through an otherwise lively city like they were loading in (it's exactly as unnerving an image as you're picturing). Those seams are getting harder to find. For better or worse, AI video models can now produce really good videos, and Gemini Omni—Google's latest model—is no e Jessica Lau Mon, 26 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/gemini-omni https://zapier.com/blog/best-pomodoro-apps The Pomodoro Technique is one of the most deceptively simple and effective productivity tools I've ever used. It stops you from procrastinating or getting distracted, so you can just get things done. All it takes is enough commitment to start a timer. While any timer (or timer app) will work for the Pomodoro Technique, a dedicated Pomodoro app can make the already simple technique even simpler by automatically alternating between work and break periods, tracking how many different periods you've Harry Guinness Fri, 23 Oct 2026 14:23:00 GMT https://zapier.com/blog/best-pomodoro-apps