How to create a Slack bot to automate tasks for you

There are so many aspects of businesses that can be automated using Slack.

What does it mean to automate a task?

Imagine being able to take a process in your business, and be able to get a bot to not only do it for you, but also do it perfectly every time. Not to mention your bot can be working 24/7, often perform tasks much faster than a human, and check on updates to systems every few seconds instead of hours or days. aka. the perfect employee.

What sort of tasks can be automated in Slack?

Almost anything you can think of. You're only limited by your creativity.

Say a client wants to know their balance on their account. They could email you, and then you reply. Or you could give them a slash command to retrieve their balance whenever they want.

Maybe a developer needs to log time they've worked. They could go into an accountancy system and manually enter that time, and then send a message to a project manager to let them they've finished their task. Or... you could give that developer a single custom slash command that will perform all those tasks for them.

So what are we going to learn in this course?

Let's say you have a company where employees can submit purchase requests for things they might want. They would normally fill out some form, give it to a secretary, who would then take it to the CEO to make a decision on. That secretary then needs to give that feedback to the employee who requested the purchase.

The secretary will also monitor all the purchase requests, so that if the CEO has forgotten to make a decision on one of them, that secretary will remind the CEO.

In this course we're essentially going to code up this entire flow, primarily by turning the human secretary into a Slack bot. So that the only human beings who will use the system is the CEO and the employee making the purchase request.

Pretty amazing right?