I’ve been writing brand stories lately. Like a bunch of them. And with all of the meetings, docs, and transcripts it’s hard to remember all the little details and to not get these brands confused. Guess what’s good at remembering things… yeah, it’s AI.

I’ve written a bunch of stuff over the past year about AI and shared some fun workflows but this might be my favorite workflow yet. I’m using it for brand strategy but you can use it for pretty much any work that has an expanding knowledge set (aka anything with recurring meetings).

This one was a lot of fun to build

Spaces and GPTs and Projects and Gems, oh my!

I’m gonna say it because I don’t think anyone else wants to. These are all the same thing. Perplexity has Spaces. ChatGPT has GPTs. Claude has Projects. Google has Gems. They’re all a way to create a space where you can have a persistent memory aka it remembers what you talked about and any info you shared.

These are great because you can create a specific place to work on a single thing and you can share it so everyone on your team has the same information.

Isn’t AI already remembering everything?

Ehh, in some ways but not really. It really only has the context you provide it (plus whatever the LLM learns from the internet) so if you’re working on a project where things are constantly changing then you’re constantly manually updating that context and that’s super annoying.

When I say things are constantly changing, I mean there’s new information coming into the fold. Think about a product launch… you have your base spec and strategy, then the product changes or the timeline does, you have recurring weekly meetings where new information is shared, your competitors launch something similar so you have to take that into account. Every time one of these things happens you have to upload or link another file to your AI tool.

In this brand strategy example, I’m reviewing client provided docs, I’m having interviews, I’m doing my own research, we’re having review calls. There’s new context almost every day. Fathom is the AI Notetaker of choice at OhSnap! and it joins every call. After each call I’d export the transcript, convert it to PDF, upload the PDF to a Perplexity Space then continue working. It’s a 2 minute task but I think I did it close to 10 times before saying enough is enough and here’s where it gets good.

Fathom to Google Drive to Perplexity courtesy of Zapier

What a namedroppy headline that was but I did need all of these to set it up. Oddly enough one of the brand stories is our own so the tutorial is focusing on that one.

Some quick links before we jump into it:

• Zapier is a workflow automation tool

• Perplexity is an AI powered search engine—heads up, we’re using Enterprise features for this but they’re relatively affordable

• Fathom is an AI notetaker

• Google is Google but we’re focused primarily on Google Drive for this

Also, if you’d prefer to watch me do this in under 5 min rather than read about it, this one’s for you!

Watch me build this in 5 minutes

Step 1 - Create a new Space in Perplexity

Open up Spaces in the sidebar and create a new space. You can name it, provide context and instructions and add files (we’ll get to this). Use this as a home base for a specific project. You’ll provide knowledge to Space overall and then interact with that through Threads. For the tutorial, I named mine “OhSnap! Brand Space”

Create a new space in Perplexity

Step 2 - Create a folder in Google Drive

This doesn’t have to be an empty folder but if you’re starting from scratch you might as well. This is where all of your sheets, docs, decks, PDFs, and transcripts are going to go. Give it a name that’s easy to remember and find. I went with “OS Brand transcripts.”

Step 3 - Connect Google Drive to your Perplexity Space

This is the Enterprise feature I was talking about and it’s worth every penny, in my opinion, because this is what unlocks the magic. In your Space, if you click ‘Add Files’ you’ll see a “Connector files” tab. Under “Add files“ if you’ve authed Google Drive (it takes 2 clicks), then you’ll be able to link Drive files and folders—the folders is the good one.

You need to authorize Google Drive before you can add files

Once you’ve picked your folder it’ll start to sync everything. It’s an empty folder so shouldn’t take too long just yet.

Make sure you pick a folder and not an individual file

Once you’ve picked your folder it’ll start to sync everything. It’s an empty folder so shouldn’t take too long just yet.

Step 4 - Build your Zap

This is the trickiest step of the process but this is where the magic happens. So we’re going to build a simple three-part Zap with Zapier.

This Zap is really easy to build

First we need Fathom. We’re going to use the “New Transcript” trigger. What happens is that when a meeting recording is finished and the transcript is ready, it’ll kick off the Zap. The settings there are pretty straightforward.

Next, is this filter step. So there’s a lot of ways to use this one:

1. You can use it to only get a single type of meeting through. In the video I only look for videos that have “OS Brand” in the meeting name. This will only continue the workflow if the conditions are met but it requires you to have some sort of meeting naming convention (which isn’t the end of the world)

2. You can add multiple conditions to allow multiples types of meetings through. This is the same as #1 but uses OR statements to search for certain meeting names (ex. Product A weekly standup, Marketing All-Hands, etc.). This is good if there are multiple meetings that you attend that will help in your Space.

3. If you have a naming convention, maybe something like [Product A] Meeting Name, [Client X] Feedback Review, you can work some real magic. You can replace the filter completely, do a split on the text, identify what’s in the brackets, and then use a lookup table to map different types of meetings to different Drive folders. If this all feels like gibberish, stick to 1 and 2, then hit me up about 3

Once we’ve filtered for the right meetings it’s time to create a Google Doc. This is as simple as naming the file. I went for a combo of the meeting name and meeting start time so even if you do have a recurring with the same name, you’ll have it timestamped to differentiate. For the document content, add the transcript, and make sure you add it to the right folder. Test it to make sure it works, then hit publish!

You have the Google Drive source in the shaded area, and the file I created in the individual files in the sidebar

Now every time you have a meeting about a certain topic, those transcripts will show up in your Space automatically. No more PDF conversions or uploads. About 10 seconds after you end that Zoom, your file will be in your space and you’re ready to go. Add other project files and you have an ever growing brain with all of the context you need. This is how we use AI.

The wild thing about Drive was that there were some incredibly successful people there who weren’t using AI yet. Not because there’s anything wrong with using it or because they didn’t want to but because they didn’t know how to get started. There’s lots of tools (I named at least 7 in this email alone), they’re feeling overwhelmed, they need help.

AI doesn’t have a place in everything we do but it’s really helpful in places where it does and has an important role in your brand stack. If you’re still unsure of how to leverage AI for your brand, OhSnap! is here to help.