Why your Zapier workflows keep breaking (and why upgrade to AI Agents instead)

Tired of those dreaded "automation failed" notifications? You've built the perfect workflow, everything runs smoothly for months, and then someone changes a single field name—suddenly your entire system crashes. Sound familiar?

Alane and Micah know this frustration all too well, and they're here to tell you there's a better way. Traditional automation with its rigid mapping and brittle connections is becoming a relic of the past.

In reality: while automation early-adopters are maintaining technical debt with 75+ fragile automations, newer businesses are starting AI-agent first. They're building flexible systems that adapt like humans instead of breaking at the first sign of change.

This isn't about lowering standards—it's about building smarter systems that actually scale with your business.

In this episode, you'll discover:

• Why traditional automation feels like it's held together with digital duct tape
• How AI agents use context and instructions instead of rigid mapping
• The crucial difference between "technical debt" and "people debt"
• Which of your current automations to prioritize for upgrading first
• Why companies that embrace this shift now will dominate their industries

If you're running a business where changing a form field requires calling in technical support, this episode will show you how to build systems that evolve with your needs instead of fighting against them. The automation revolution is here—the question is whether you'll lead it or get left behind.

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For more information, visit our website at biggestgoal.ai.

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Transcript

0:00:00 - (Alane): Micahe to Automate Your Agency. Every week we bring you expert insights, practical tips and success stories that will help you streamline your business operations and boost your growth. Let's get started on your journey to more efficient and scalable operations. All right, Micah, this is such a common thing when we're talking about automation integrations between multiple software platforms that when you make a change to one of the triggers, then it breaks the automation.

0:00:32 - (Micah): Okay, so what you're talking about, just to clarify, because we have entered in a new era. This is traditional old school automation.

0:00:41 - (Alane): Yes, old school automation. Which just sounds so silly to say because gosh, there's so many companies that aren't even doing this part yet.

0:00:50 - (Micah): It's old school as of last week.

0:00:52 - (Alane): Yeah.

0:00:55 - (Micah): Is.

0:00:55 - (Alane): And when we're talking about traditional automation, it would be like a maker as a zapier.

0:01:01 - (Micah): Yeah. Where you're building automation with logic. So something gets triggered, there's a sequence of steps or actions that happen and there might be some filters, there might be some, like if this equals that, then continue on, otherwise go down this other route. So a little bit of routing, but you essentially start with the trigger, build out automation steps with logic and then end with some sort of output or result.

0:01:32 - (Alane): Let me try to explain that in another way. Just in a non technical way is perfect and it may not come out that way, I don't know. But when we're talking about a trigger, it's what kicks off the automation and what the automation is looking for, let's say in maker zapier is fields basically. Hey, these are the sections here and we want this to pass through in the automation. We want to send this information here and the stuff over here is going, oh, I found this over here. And so it's talking to each other very specifically where you can see the data correlation between everything.

0:02:08 - (Micah): You're mapping it. So you would map.

0:02:10 - (Alane): Yes, it is a map. It is very much a map.

0:02:12 - (Micah): You're, you're mapping one data point to another data point between two systems inputs and some outputs.

0:02:19 - (Alane): You have a automation happening. So you're going to have an output. All right, so that's your traditional automation.

0:02:25 - (Micah): Yep. And to date, if you've worked on automation like this or hired somebody to help you with this, they've probably said things like we need this to be in a dropdown so that it's the same every single time so that we can map it from this form field to this custom field and it's going to work predictably every time. The funny thing is that's all changed.

0:02:50 - (Alane): Well, before we say that if you make a change.

0:02:53 - (Micah): I already said it.

0:02:54 - (Alane): You did. You said if you.

0:02:55 - (Micah): I just said it.

0:02:56 - (Alane): No, I just said if you make a change.

0:02:58 - (Micah): The funny thing is everything.

0:02:59 - (Alane): Okay, never mind that if you make a change to whatever your trigger or your input is, that it breaks the.

0:03:07 - (Micah): Automation or you change the fields that are being mapped. Change the fields? Yes, the mapping has broken.

0:03:12 - (Alane): If you make a change, it will most likely break the automation, which is frustrating and it feels urgent because it might be. It might be a crucial part of the business operations that now is broken. And you may not have the technical experience or knowledge to go in and fix that.

0:03:28 - (Micah): Or the automation has been working great for a year. You hire a new person in their responsibilities, they go, oh, why do we have this field in the form? Let me rename it. Let me change these options, let me do this. And without thinking, or with their thinking, of course, but without knowing that it's actually connected to this whole other system that's running behind the scenes, they make the change and suddenly warnings, errors, nothing's.

0:03:59 - (Micah): Nothing's working the way that it used to.

0:04:03 - (Alane): So those are the old ways. So the funny thing is, maika, that that can now be changed.

0:04:08 - (Micah): Yes, it's. But it's not funny. It is serious. This is. No, it is. It is so cool what we can do. Because what, you know, as we work on projects like this, it is. Who cares if it's a drop down or not. Somebody wants to put in a text field that's actually going to help, in this case the AI agents, which is the new way to do it.

0:04:32 - (Alane): Mm.

0:04:33 - (Micah): All right, so before we get too far ahead of ourselves, the. The big difference is old school or traditional automation relies on logic and mapping. The new school or the AI supported way to do it through agents is without any mapping and without any logic. It's with instructions, as if you were educating or training another person on your team on how to do something. So if we take a situation like we have an intake form that has a bunch of fields and we want to get that data into a project management tool like Monday, we would traditionally design the form with dropdowns and all the information that we need and then we would write the automation that would map from the form fields to the custom fields in Monday.

0:05:22 - (Micah): Cool works. It's worked for years. It's great. The new school way to do that is to say, all right, we design our form however we want. We still may want to use dropdowns for various reasons, not Saying you shouldn't use them, but the form design is flexible. Then we set up our custom fields in Monday however we want. That's flexible. Then we give an AI agent context, which is the key here. So we give the AI agent the tools to say, what are all the fields in this form? Cool.

0:05:53 - (Micah): Then we give it the tools to say, what are all the custom fields in Monday? We give it the instructions to say, find the fields in the form that match the fields, the custom fields in Monday and populate those values. I'm paraphrasing, but not by much.

0:06:09 - (Alane): Right. It really works more like a human, where it can say, oh, we've got these things over here and we've got these things over here. I can match these together. And you, you didn't have to be so specific like you do in a traditional automation, where you have to map exactly how to do it. With an agentic AI agent sequence, the AI agent is kind of like, oh, I kind of got this. I know what's happening here.

0:06:37 - (Micah): Yeah, let's. Let's say the form says something. Let's just say it's called upload your brief as the form field inside of the form and you're uploading a document or a PDF. But the custom field in Monday is called Project Brief. Normally that would have to be mapped one to one and sometimes even renaming things can break stuff if it's not developed correctly. Now it can have two similar names and the AI agent can go, yeah, got it. That's probably right.

0:07:13 - (Alane): Yeah.

0:07:15 - (Micah): The key would be testing after this. But let's take this one step further. Now we want to change stuff in the form again. Traditionally we'd have to go back, we'd have to change stuff in the form. We'd then have to change the automation. We'd have to test it multiple times to make sure that goes through. And then we'd have to update the custom fields inside of Monday as well. Now we can take that whole middle step out and we can say, let's just edit the form and let's just give it a new custom field in Monday where we want that form data to go.

0:07:50 - (Micah): If built right, we are not touching the agent because the agent's instructions stays the same. The context is now given with the new form in the Monday, or, sorry, in the form itself, the form field. And it's getting the context. Here's the new custom field and it.

0:08:07 - (Alane): Can connect the dots so things continue working more likely in an AI agent workflow because of that autonomous that it has versus a Traditional workflow or automation.

0:08:22 - (Micah): Yes, yes. And when we think about how many things can be automated and how many things could break once they're automated and how much maintenance that takes versus shifting your, your traditional automations where possible to AI agent automations, it's a whole new ball game and it provides so much more scalability. We talked about this in a previous episode. The technical side of, of building these things versus the non technical side.

0:08:55 - (Micah): Typically operations and things like building forms and setting up ClickUp or Monday is a non technical type of thing. It's going to be your project manager's style role that conflicts. When a project manager who doesn't know how the automations are built are changing things, want to change things, want to improve, want to improve operations, but then has to get other people involved to then make it all still work, we can throw that out the window and scale a lot faster because we can then start changing things, start improving our processes, start improving our workflows, all without having to update the automation because the agents sit there as the core instead of mapping.

0:09:42 - (Alane): And so Micah, let's talk through, let's think about a company that has a lot of make or zapier scenarios and they're going, oh my gosh, well Now I've got 75 scenarios that I've used this traditional way and now you're telling me that there's a new better way. How would I even get to that version when I've got it's now technical debt. It is so and updating it all.

0:10:08 - (Micah): And part of it is that's that's the name of the game with business for sure.

0:10:13 - (Alane): You know that when you're using tech and I'm not saying not to do that because even updating 75 scenarios is a lot less time than training and employing people to do this tedious work of if they didn't have the automation. But when we're thinking about keeping things current and updating it is looking at, well, what things do you want to change right now? That if you change would break the automation.

0:10:38 - (Alane): Yep, that's a good place to start looking at building an AI agent automation for then start there. You don't need to do all 75 at one time, but which ones are most pressing or which one. Maybe you look at it and say okay, well all these at least have automation happening. But there were these other things I wanted to do. Great, now is the time to start building it as an AI agent automation versus continuing down the traditional automation path.

0:11:06 - (Micah): Yes, again, it's staying competitive. It's staying scalable, it's not creating new fires and new headaches 100%. I mean, essentially what you're saying, Alane, is prioritize them. Yes, if you have 70 automations that are running great, but start looking at which ones do I want to prioritize to rebuild in this new structure, which ones would be faster, which ones would be more efficient, which ones would keep breaking, which ones would afford me more flexibility.

0:11:40 - (Alane): And this is the time to get motivated to do that because a lot of times we put things off because it's work and we don't want to do it, you know, updating the automations like, oh well, we can't change it because then we got to go fix automation. Well, this is the perfect time to do that and build it in a new way. Something that you've been putting off for a long time.

0:12:00 - (Micah): So, you know, typically this, this type of conversation has been reserved for software and hardware and development on that side because of technical debt. We're now entering the time where AI is going into operationally how a business is run and creating technical debt on that side, which, which might be a new thought for a lot of people that would typically run their business or run operations in a business to start having to think about this stuff.

0:12:32 - (Micah): But it is here. And a big piece of all of this is newer businesses are starting with AI. They're going AI first, they're going agents first, they're having agents support their team so they don't have that technical debt which makes them more agile, which means they're able to build all this up first. Now, two, three years from now, they will have tech debt because it inevitably is going to change and they're going to get caught up. But that doesn't mean you can just sit there and stay where you are either.

0:13:05 - (Alane): Right? Well if, if you don't have technical debt, you have people debt, that means you have way too many people doing too many things and your margins are so much lower and you're going to start asking questions like, well, how can they even compete? They must be losing money left and right. No, it's the opposite. They've got these systems automated so they don't have the people debt. So looking at your org, you know, do you have people debt?

0:13:30 - (Alane): Do you have automation or technical debt? And then finding a way to start getting rid of those two so you can stay up to date on the new technology. And I mean this, this whole concept never ends, Micah, like you're talking about, it recycles itself. Blockbuster was the Largest movie rental place. Well, now that concept's out the door, we don't. There's one left in the world. And it's more of a nostalgic thing. I think that people like to go and rent a movie.

0:14:01 - (Alane): But this idea of technology always is evolving and the companies that don't embrace it or aren't able to change eventually do go away. And they're asking the question, well, how do they even do it? Well, they started early enough to where they could keep up with the change.

0:14:17 - (Micah): Yeah, I mean, take Netflix, like Netflix original concept was an advancement over Blockbuster, but then they went with technology early. They weren't the first, but they went with streaming technology early and that changed their whole course of business. I mean that, that's a perfect example, obviously a larger example than some of the stuff that we're talking about now. But I think the point that we're trying to make is now is the time to start changing, to start looking and suck it up and say, okay, I can't. Like this is constantly evolving.

0:14:58 - (Micah): The real downside to all of this is maybe downside isn't the right word. The real issue is that things are changing faster than ever. I mean, Alane, you and I talk about this quite a bit in our business is this is different than our previous business. Because even though we were on the cutting edge of social media and social ads and reputation management, things did not change nearly as fast as it's changing now. So we had the time to hire teams, train teams, develop processes, get Everything working in 12 and 24 month time spans before things, you know, evolve to kind of the next stage.

0:15:47 - (Micah): Now, three months, six months, things are changing so fast. I mean from last year was every platform needs AI integrated this year, every platform needs their version of agents. What's next year? We don't quite know yet. And so we're all along for the ride on trying to just keep, keep up. And that's while we're trying to run our businesses on top of all of that.

0:16:15 - (Alane): Yeah. You know, Micah, it's funny hearing that because I agree with you, definitely. But thinking about the car dealerships when I would meet with them and we're talking about social media and ads and they probably felt like things are change too. Things are changing too fast. What do you mean? I'm not going to do radio ads and traditional forms of media. And there was so much education we were doing on, well, people are on social media. More people were on social media talking about the super bowl than watched the super bowl back. I remember Doing a webinar with Facebook. We partnered and, and doing this and these were some of the things and they were just like they felt like things were changing so fast. But anyway, I was laughing thinking about that when you were talking about this. But things are happening a lot faster and the, even our, our business has evolved to keep up with it over the last five years because of these trends. Like we're not continuing to only work in the project management system automation, we do make automation and now we're doing AI agent automation. And because we have to stay up to date as an organization on what we're providing as a service and teaching our clients about these or else we're going to be giving a gap to our clients.

0:17:29 - (Alane): We're not servicing them 100%.

0:17:32 - (Micah): I, I, I think, you know, I was, I was just thinking the same thing as you were chatting, Alane, which is even our services are evolving at a rapid clip. So we're introducing new online courses, we're introducing mastermind groups in the intent to say how like our value is quickly becoming. How do we help our clients keep up to date with this rapid changing environment? Because if every business out there is trying to build their own teams, trying to do it themselves, that's more than a full time job.

0:18:05 - (Micah): We have a team that helps us. We're building, we're prototyping, we're testing new things. We're doing all of that work as our jobs.

0:18:15 - (Alane): Yeah. That's our company and that's the value we have. If you're doing your company that is not this, then there's no way you can do that and keep up at the pace that we, what we're doing. And so we want to be able to share that knowledge and keep you up to speed without you having to do every step of the leg work. So we are coming out with a mastermind for that reason.

0:18:35 - (Micah): It's one of the reasons we started this podcast.

0:18:38 - (Alane): Yeah.

0:18:38 - (Micah): Because how else can we reach enough people to even talk about these topics without something like this?

0:18:47 - (Alane): And we try to keep them short too because we don't want to bore people with all of our expertise.

0:18:52 - (Micah): Well, not only that, things are changing so fast we don't have time to recreate record long podcasts.

0:18:58 - (Alane): Yes. So if, if you all are interested in our mastermind or any of our courses reach out to us, we've got a wait list happening for the mastermind and we'll be continuing, continuing to share this knowledge but getting deeper into the concepts so that you could really make impactful change in your company.

0:19:15 - (Alane): Thanks for listening to this episode of Automate Your Agency. We hope you're inspired to take your business to the next level. Don't forget to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and leave us a review. Your feedback helps us improve and reach more listeners. If you're looking for more resources, visit our website at BiggestGold AI for free content and tools for automating your business. Join us next week as we dive into more ways to automate and scale your business.

0:19:40 - (Alane): Bye for now.