014 AI For Operators

Hi there, 

Welcome back to AI for Operators. Here’s what we’ve got for you this week:

• The Operator: Jaron Sander, Founder & Growth Engineer at Inform Growth (listen to the episode here)

• The Review: Bardeen.ai - a workflow automation tool with native web scraping capabilities.

• The Links: 10 links, including multiple perspectives on AI Agents, lessons from enterprise AI adoption, and an essay debating whether evals are important.

This is not a sponsored post.

What it Does

Bardeen is a workflow automation tool with native web scraping capabilities, making it particularly effective for operators who want to run automations in their browser and as opportunities come up (versus setting up complex automations once and having them trigger more regularly).

Why Ops Leaders Should Care

Finding the perfect workflow automation tool is tough. And Bardeen isn’t perfect - at least not for every use case. But if you or your team’s work involves lead generation and follow-up, monitoring websites, updating spreadsheets, repetitive recruiting work, or transferring data between systems, Bardeen could be a good way to save a lot of time.

Key Features (Pros & Cons)

Pros

• User-friendly, no-code interface makes automation simple and accessible for even the least technical operators.

• Automations and workflows, especially around data entry tasks, can help operators save significant amounts of time.

• Web scraping and browser automation helps Bardeen stand out from other no code automation tools, which can be particularly helpful for customer-facing teams that need to pull live information from customers’ or prospects’ sites.

• Privacy-conscious: all automations run locally in your browser, which means sensitive data isn’t uploaded to Bardeen’s servers.

• Strong, positive user feedback on G2 and Product Hunt.

Cons

• Bardeen’s approach to ‘proactive automation’ means that users need to trigger workflows rather than them happening automatically in the background like Zapier. This has advantages, but also has disadvantages.

• Like most workflow and automation platforms, there’s a fairly steep learning curve that requires dedicated time and attention for you to take full advantage of the product.

• Usage-based pricing means that it can get pricey quickly if you’re a power user.

• While Bardeen has hundreds of integrations, if you’re using a particularly niche tool, the team may not have built that integration yet, which may make it less useful for you.

Other Options

Bottom Line

Bardeen is a powerful tool great for non-technical users (and teams). While the usage-based pricing means it can get pricey fast, folks with lightweight use cases (or those just wanting to try it out) can still save a lot of time without spending a bunch of money. And after all, if you’re burning through your credits by automating a ton of tasks across different platforms and workflows, it may be a sign that you should make the transition from a no-code tool like Bardeen to hybrid or more code-first solution - or at least that’s one of the lessons we learned in this week’s podcast with Jaron.