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AI IN MI I BY PETER DODS CONFESSIONS OF A MUSIC RETAIL AI ADDICT
I n last month’s column, I tackled “contextual inertia,” or the trap of letting AI polish your bad ideas rather than helping you build bet- ter ones. As promised, I would like to move to “level four” — the workflow automator. But in order to do that, I have a confession to make: I’m an AI addict. My gateway drug was a You- Tube video by creator Nate Herk. He demonstrated how a PDF in- voice could automatically down- load from Gmail, be read by AI and populate a database without any human hands required. He used n8n.io to do it. On the screen of my computer, I watched a static piece of paper turn into organized data like magic. I had already been tinkering with Google Apps Script, so I turned to my AI assistant and asked: “Can you help me replicate this automa- tion for free using Google Apps Script?” The answer was “yes.” Together, we built a script that grabs PDF email attachments from Gmail, parses the data, converts it to columns in a Google Sheet and archives the old file. I didn’t pay for an automation platform. I built my own inside the software I was already paying for. Without AI, I was overwhelmed by all the things I couldn’t do. With AI, I’m overwhelmed by all the things I can do.
“With AI’s help, the result is a custom-built marketing engine for zero dollars. We never had time to create product emails before this, but last week, we sold a Martin Custom Shop guitar directly from one of them.”
tion from my Shopify data and wraps it in HTML. If I reference two SKUs in a row, the system automatically generates a double product card instead of a single one. The magic happens in the back- ground, where an AI-written script acts as the assembly line. It stacks those blocks into a clean email and shoots it directly to Mailchimp. To
rows you see on big retailer sites is a manual nightmare. So, I fixed it by turning Google Sheets into my email builder. I treat the spreadsheet like a layer cake. Each row is a distinct content block, like a header, a text section or a product grid. When I enter a SKU, the sheet instantly pulls the image, price and descrip-
Here are three workflows I built with AI that save me time and un- lock capabilities I never had before. 1. CUSTOM EMAIL MARKETING ENGINE Most email marketing platforms are a headache. The interfaces are clunky, the widgets are rigid and building those slick multi-product
22 I MUSIC INC. I JUNE 2026
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