Webinar: When to automate with AI, and when not to

One business process, automated three ways and priced side by side, so you can see whether a workflow builder, custom code or an AI agent suits yours.

When: Tuesday 24 November 2026, 12:00pm NZT
How long: 40 minutes, including questions.
Where: Online on Google Meet. The link arrives by email.
Cost: Free.
You leave with: A four question checklist for choosing how to automate any recurring process.
Can’t make it? Register anyway and I will email you the recording.

Most automation advice starts with AI, but most processes teams want to automate follow fixed rules.

Take an order that has to pass through five steps:

Order in
Check stock
Update the CRM
Raise the invoice
Notify the team

In this session I build that process three ways: with a workflow builder, custom code and an AI agent. Then I compare what each one costs.

Who this is for

Your team spends hours moving data between systems by hand.
Your Zapier, Make or Power Automate bill is climbing, or your workflows break whenever someone changes them.
You have been told to use AI and want to know where it fits in a process you already run.
You ruled out custom code because it takes too long to build.

You do not need to know how to code. I explain every code example in plain language.

What we cover

What Zapier and Make cost at volume

Where the bill comes from, and what a five step workflow costs at 10,000 runs a month.
The limits you hit later: debugging, version control and clunky custom code steps.
Self hosting n8n to cut the bill, and the upkeep it adds.

The free option you already own

Google Apps Script is free and already connected to your Google Workspace data.
The quotas and execution limits to plan around before you rely on it.

Automations that retry themselves

Automatic retries, a record of every run, and pauses of weeks or months between steps.
Demoed on Cloudflare Workflows, with equivalents on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.

Letting AI write it, and what to check first

What to review before you run code an AI wrote.

Where AI is the right choice

Reading free-text enquiries, ranking them by priority and sorting open ended responses.
Cases where a workflow builder or custom code would have beaten an AI agent.

Four questions for your own processes

A checklist to pick the right approach for each process.

Who you are working with

I am Curtis Warner, a reporting and workflow automation consultant based in New Zealand.

I have built reporting and automation for teams at the University of Auckland and Are Media, across ad platforms, CRMs and spreadsheets, using tools like n8n, Google Apps Script and whatever your stack already runs on.

Register

Registration is free. The joining link arrives by email.

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