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Once added, you can pin it to your Chrome toolbar for easier access.

Step 2: Create Slack behavior in Zapier Central

Now that we have the Zapier Central Chrome extension added, we can create our Slack Updater bot. To do this, go to your Zapier Central bot dashboard and click the “New bot” button in the top left corner of the page.

This will create a new, untitled bot. We can rename the bot by clicking on the three dots icon in the top right corner of the screen. We’ll rename our bot to “Slack Updater”.

Now that our bot is renamed, we can add a Behavior. A Behavior is a series of settings that we’ll configure that defines how we’ll trigger the bot action, what the instruction for the bot should be upon being triggered, and what action it should take within 3rd party applications. To add a Behavior, click the “Behaviors” button at the bottom of the screen.

For the Behavior Trigger, we’ll set it to “When I message the bot.” This will allow us to Trigger this Behavior when using the Chrome extension we installed in the previous step.

Once we select the Trigger, we need to define a specific phrase or keyword that triggers the Behavior. We’ll set it to “update Slack.”

With the Trigger set, now we can add instructions to our Zapier Central Bot. These Instructions are essentially a system prompt for the Bot (i.e. what it will be instructed to do each time it’s called). We’re going to instruct our Bot to extract takeaways from an Airtable record and post them as a project update in Slack.

Sample prompt:

Extract the key takeaways from the Airtable record and post a project update to Slack.

The last step of setting up the Zapier Central Bot Behavior is the Action step. This is where you’ll add the action it should perform in a 3rd party application given your Trigger and Instruction. For our Action, we’ll select Slack as the application.

You can either select the Action from Zapier Central’s suggestions or click the “Add Action” button and select Slack as the application.

Zapier Central will then prompt us with a few options for Actions. Note, that it will intuit and rank the actions based on your previously defined Instruction, which is helpful. For this example, we’ll select Send Channel Message. We’re choosing this because we’ll be sending the project takeaways to a public channel in Slack.

Make sure that your Slack instance is authenticated, and when that’s complete, you can select the public channel from a list of options. We’ll be sending our updates to our “project-updates” channel.

With these parameters set, you can define a few additional settings, like the Message Text, Slack Bot Name, Bot Icon, and more — we’ll leave these to the default values, letting the AI generate the values for these fields.

With the Action set, we need to enable the Behavior to complete the setup process. To do this, set the Behavior to “On” by toggling the switch in the top right corner.

Step 3: Send Zapier Central command in your project management app

With our Zapier Central Bot Behavior created, we can go to a project page in our project management app. In Airtable, this is the Record Details view in Airtable Interfaces for one of our project records. On the project page, click the pinned Zapier Central extension in your toolbar to open the Zapier Central sidebar and click on the “Slack Updater” bot we just built.

With a new chat open, enter the Trigger Phrase. In our case, it’s “update Slack.”

The Zapier Central Bot will then start working step-by-step to extract the key takeaways from the open project page and post them as an update to Slack. At the very bottom of the message, the Zapier Central Bot will provide a link to the Slack post. Click on that link to go directly to the Slack message.

And that’s it! In Slack, you should see a summary of the project posted by Zapier in the Slack channel you selected when you set up the bot. Project management just got a whole lot more automated! Now, there’s no excuse for not updating your stakeholders on the progress of your work.

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This tutorial was created by Garrett.

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