My AI Bots for Email, SEO, Reports, More

Last week I described the customer service voice agent I built for Beardbrand. We’re a small team and can’t afford human phone support.

So using Grok Bot and the Grok Voice API, both from SpaceXAI (formerly xAI), I created a surprisingly realistic and effective phone agent in less than a day. The agent sounds natural and responds accurately to shoppers’ support calls.

Yet Grok Bot is more than a voice agent. It can drive productivity for entrepreneurs and staff across an entire business.

I’ll offer examples in this episode. My entire audio narration is embedded below. The transcript is edited for length and clarity.

I use Grok Bot because it just works. Ask it to do something, and it does it. And it’s getting better. The new Shopify integration is improving by the day.

And it’s built for teams. We create a lot of videos at Beardbrand. One of our human video editors is training a Grok Bot. If she goes on vacation, the bot can take over.

Give Grok Bot to a 10-person team and all of a sudden it’s the equivalent of 100 because each person can 10x productivity. Think about all of their routine tasks and how Grok Bot can expedite or entirely take over.

Beardbrand projects

Here are some tasks beyond the voice agent I’ve been working on.

The first was to use Grok Bot as my email screener. It’s the executive assistant I never hired. So now I have one for less than $100 a month. The bot screens my emails twice a day. It filters my emails, flags in red what I need to address, and calls out urgent messages. I deal with email only twice a day and address only what matters.

It’s a game changer. The downside is folks who pitch me as potential guests have to figure out how to get through the gatekeeper.

Another task is generating Beardbrand’s weekly performance reports. I’ve created an agent that extracts key metrics from Shopify, Grapevine (our post-purchase survey tool), Amazon, Meta, and other sources. The bot then puts them in a spreadsheet for our weekly staff meeting. I used to do that manually. No more.

Setting up email and SMS flows in a platform such as Klaviyo is another example. Grok Bot can build those flows and create the emails. “Flows,” I should add, are automated emails or messages triggered by recipients’ actions or inactions, such as browsing a certain category or not purchasing for over a year.

I once hired an agency to set up our Klaviyo account, including the flows. The project took months and cost thousands of dollars. Yet for a recent side project, I configured an account on another email platform and created 48 flows, all in a few hours using Grok Bot.

Another use is optimizing our content for search engines. I’ve spun up an SEO agent on Grok Bot. I wanted to know rankings, impressions, and clicks on Google for the content we produce, as reported by Search Console. (I no longer bother with Google Analytics.) Grok Bot can access Search Console and pull that data.

We use Grok Bot to crawl our site for mistakes. For example, we just launched a new cologne called Worn Denim. Our site had conflicting instructions on how to apply it. One section said to apply it to two to four pulse points, and another said two to six. The bot flagged the conflict.

Grok Bot helps maintain a single source of truth for our published company info. All such content on the site should be accurate, complete, and consistent. For example, our privacy policy, terms of use, About page, and trademark disclosures should have no gaps or contradictions.

Start small

Start with small projects, get the hang of it, and then integrate bigger tasks. I know merchants who built a bot for a single source of truth and then evolved to bots that handle returns, voice calls, and emails.

To be clear, I don’t want Grok Bot to make strategic decisions or change key components of our business. I don’t want it for my personal needs, such as shopping online or booking veterinarian appointments for my dog.

Thanks to tools such as Grok Bot, it’s a fun time to be an entrepreneur, an idea person. The operational components are now less burdensome, if not fully solved.