Moving from Short-Term Uses to Automations
Previous articles covered AI tools such as chatbots, custom agents, and source-grounded notebooks. However, a key limitation is that these tools are reactive — they wait for a prompt, which still takes time. Automating repetitive tasks offers much greater time savings. Consider a few examples:
You can type a request into an AI chatbot, asking it to check your calendar and list your important upcoming meetings. But it won't automatically send you a daily email with a list of the next day's meetings, including notes pulled from recent, relevant emails.
You can use the AI function in your spreadsheet to set up a table to track invoices. It will create columns for the date, invoice number, vendor, and so on. But it won't automatically check your incoming emails, find attached invoices, save those attachments to a specific folder, and then extract from the attachment to fill in the required information on your invoice tracking sheet.
For SBOs, this technology allows staff to shift resources away from time-consuming administrative roadblocks and toward core leadership duties, supporting operational excellence through continuous improvement.
Enter Automation
New "no code" tools are emerging to solve this problem, making real-time, automated applications accessible to everyday users. These solutions connect to your systems for daily work, like email, spreadsheets, cloud storage, and calendar.
A note of caution is always warranted: Generally, education-specific AI products offer a higher level of data protection than the general public versions (data is not looked at by people or used to train AI models). However, you must work closely with your system administrator and district leaders to consider AI usage carefully, as there are many privacy and safety implications, and rules differ by state and locality.
How It Works
In early December 2025, Google released a new tool in its AI collection: Workspace Studio. It is available to users of the Workspace for Education product line, but some additional features are only accessible if you have the AI Pro license. It allows you to create smooth, automatic processes without being a programmer. These automated processes, called flows, are built on three main components: the starter, the actions, and AI integrations.
1. Starter (Trigger): This is the specific event or set schedule that begins the automated process. For instance, a flow might start when you receive a new email that matches certain rules, when a file is added to a specific Google Drive folder, when a change is made in a shared spreadsheet, or when a new response is submitted to an internal form. Flows can also be set to run on a precise schedule, such as generating recurring daily or weekly reports.
2. Actions (Steps): These are the tasks the automated agent performs afterward. A flow can have a single action or a complicated series of multiple steps. Basic actions include sending messages in a collaboration tool, setting up meetings, creating new documents or folders, and updating rows in data sheets.
3. AI Integration: The most powerful feature is how generative AI is built in to handle context and reasoning. This allows the flow to include smart steps like "Ask Gemini" (for writing and analyzing), "Summarize/Recap" (for condensing long emails or documents), and "Extract" (for pulling specific data, such as an invoice number, vendor name, or total amount, from an email or document). Workflows can also include logic steps, such as a "Decide" step that uses AI to make a judgment call based on criteria (for example, evaluating if an email's tone is urgent) before sending the process down different paths.
Practical Applications in the School Business Office
For SBOs, this technology allows staff to shift resources away from time-consuming administrative roadblocks and toward core leadership duties, supporting operational excellence through continuous improvement. Here are practical ways these flows can be used, based on current SBO duties:
- Automated Document and Form Processing: Capital projects involve many documentation steps. A flow triggered by an incoming email with the project number in the body or subject line could automatically use AI to pull out key details, record the data in a spreadsheet, create a draft confirmation email, and set up an approval task, instantly simplifying the intake process.
- Enhancing Communication and Transparency: Clear communication is vital for gaining support for the budget and maintaining stakeholder trust. A flow could be designed to start when a raw data export from financial software is dropped in a Drive folder, analyze it, draft key internal communications, and share the file with staff who can finalize it.
- Paperless Financial Workflows: The shift to paperless and electronic record-keeping is a major trend in school business offices. Automated flows can handle the routing, necessary approvals (using AI action steps like "Check If"), and archiving of digital invoices based on set business rules.
The process of creating automated workflows must start with a deep dive into the school's procedures and work routines. What are the pain points, where do the backlogs occur? Thinking through these issues first will allow you to make effective use of the new tools. By thoughtfully implementing AI workflow technology, the school business office can ensure greater consistency, timeliness, and free up staff to focus on strategic initiatives.