How to automate tasks with Make (Integromat) and AI

1. Go to https://www.make.com
2. Click “Get started free” and sign up with your email or your Google account.
3. It will ask a couple of things to personalize your experience; you can answer or skip them.
4. You’ll land on your dashboard. That’s your starting point.

You don’t need a credit card for the free plan.

Before building anything, three words you’ll use all the time:

• Scenario: your full automation, the flow from start to end.
• Module: each step inside the scenario. The first one is the trigger, what starts everything (e.g. “a new email arrives”).
• Operation: each time a module runs. Your free plan comes with 1,000 per month. (In 2026 Make renamed them credits, it’s the same thing.)

Think of it like a recipe: the scenario is the dish, the modules are the steps, and every time you cook you use ingredients (operations).

1. On the dashboard, click “Create a new scenario” (top right).
2. You’ll see an empty canvas with a big ”+”. Click there.
3. Search for the trigger app. To practice, a good example is Gmail → “Watch emails”.
4. Make will ask you to connect your account for Gmail: you grant permission once and you’re set.
5. Configure the trigger: which folder to watch (e.g. “Inbox”) and how many emails to check per run.

The trigger is the “when”. It can be an email, a form, a new row in a sheet, a time of day, etc.

Here’s where the AI comes in. We’ll have the AI summarize each incoming email.

1. Next to your first module, click the ”+” to add another.
2. Search for “Anthropic Claude” or “OpenAI (ChatGPT)” and pick the action “Create a completion” or “Message a model” (the name varies).
3. It will ask you to connect your account with an API key. You get that key on the provider’s site (in Anthropic’s or OpenAI’s console). Copy it and paste it into Make.
4. In the prompt field, tell it what you want. For example:

Summarize this email in 2 lines and tell me if it needs an urgent reply (yes/no):
{{email content}}

5. You insert that {{email content}} by clicking the field and choosing the data the Gmail module brings. Make connects the output of one step to the input of the next.

You need an account with the AI (Claude or ChatGPT) and its API key. The AI cost is billed separately from Make.

You now have the “when” (email) and the “what it thinks” (AI summary). What’s missing is the “what I do with it”.

1. Add a third module with the ”+”.
2. A useful example: Google Sheets → “Add a row” to save each summary in a sheet.
3. In the sheet’s columns, drag the data: the date, the email subject and the summary the AI generated (it appears as the output of the AI module).
4. Another option: instead of a sheet, send the summary to your Slack, Telegram or your own email.

It ends up like this: email arrives → the AI summarizes it → it’s saved neatly. All by itself.

1. Bottom left, click “Run once” to test the scenario a single time.
2. Make runs the flow with real data and shows, on each module, a little bubble with what happened. There you see if the AI summarized well and if the row was saved.
3. If something fails, the module turns red: open it, read the message and adjust.
4. When it works, flip the “Scheduling” switch to ON (bottom left) and choose how often it runs (e.g. every 15 minutes).

Start with a wide interval (every 15 min or every hour) so you don’t burn your free operations all at once.

Problem	Fix
The AI module gives an “API key” error	Check you copied the full key and that your provider account has balance or credit
The trigger finds no emails	Confirm the right folder and that there are new unread emails
I ran out of operations	Widen the run interval or wait for next month; the free plan resets
I don’t know which data to drag	Run “Run once” first: after that Make knows the outputs and offers them
The AI answers too much	Be more specific in the prompt (state the exact format and length you want)

Once you’re comfortable with this, also check our tutorials on automating with n8n and AI and automating tasks with no code. And if you want to jump to an assistant that decides on its own, create your first AI agent.