Scott’s business receives about 3,000 pieces of mail a year. Every piece runs through a process called mail scan to assignment — and until now, a human had to look at each one just to decide who it belonged to.
Map it before you automate it. Scott keeps a blueprint for every process in his business, hand-drawn in a notebook. When something breaks, that’s where you go. As you automate more, you lose visibility into where data flows from — the blueprint is how you keep it.
The current process:
Traveling Mailbox receives and scans the mail
Scans land in Dropbox
A Zapier zap moves them into Notion, the company brain
A task appears on a Notion list
A human opens each one and assigns it
The change: Replace step 5. Grokbot is already connected to Notion. Scott built a set of mail routing rules over time — including a fallback that escalates anything low-confidence to a person. The AI reads the item, applies the rules, assigns it, and moves it to in-progress.
Tested in a sandbox first. Eight items in, five assigned, three determined non-actionable.
One change at a time. Scott also wants to kill the Zapier step — it’s grown to a few hundred dollars a month — and eventually trigger on arrival instead of running on a schedule. Both are coming later. Make one change, ship it, get team feedback, then revisit.
On triggers: An event (mail arrives), a time (weekdays at 8am), or a condition. Pick the one that fits.
Next: How to get rid of the Zap.