Stuck on Deployment

I built a nifty AI utility tool for a client that will look into a google folder and sub folders, ingest all documents, then extract names & titles of all the people it finds inside. It’s a quick way for the sales team to comb through historical contracts, SOWs, project plans, etc and find the people we’ve worked with in the past who could become new contacts – even if they’re at new companies.

Scripting the AI prompt took a couple of hours. I needed a tight prompt so the end user doesn’t have to interact with the script yet still receives a tidy output list every time. That turned out to be the easy part.

For this project, the challenge (for me) was the deployment, especially as I learned more about Google’s ecosystem. Linking Apps Scripts to a GCP project, enabling Google Drive API in Cloud Console and adding it to the Apps Script, authorizing the script, etc. The deployment took many more hours than the AI piece. I felt frustrated – right on the verge of having a useful tool, but stuck in the details of deployment.

I eventually set it aside for the night and came back the next morning. I asked AI to create a checklist of EVERY SINGLE detail necessary for setup and deployment. That cracked the case and got me across the finish line.

Using AI to solve the deployment issue was pretty nifty as well.