Grok Bot automations for calendar, packages and travel

The short version

Besides the bot that triages my email, I’ve built several other Grok bots. Each one does a single chore I’d rather not do. On its own, each is minor. Together, they take a lot of small admin off my plate.

For the setup, the cost and the cautions, see how I use Grok Bot to run my inbox and calendar.

The bots

• Calendaring. We have six kids, so our household runs on a lot of calendars: kids’ activities, appointments, school, my wife’s work schedule, and my personal and work calendars. I ask for changes in plain words and it makes them. Keeping the schedule in order isn’t one more thing I do by hand. When school sends home a document, I upload it. The bot pulls out the dates and events for each kid’s grade. It also spots events in my email and suggests or adds them. When I bought tickets to an Edgar Allan Poe event, it added it to the calendar.

• Alerts for what matters. Each morning, a bot lays out the day’s agenda in simple form, the packages due today with an estimated time, and a summary of important emails, meaning the ones that look like they’re from a real person and need my attention. It updates whenever the calendar changes, and the email summary updates hourly. The updates come to me as chat messages in the Grok app. Some alerts go out as iMessages to family members, and my wife gets her own morning digest of the day’s events.

• Package tracking. It pulls tracking codes and shipping details out of my email and tracks the packages. I don’t have to dig up the confirmation email or paste a tracking number into a carrier’s site. What I get is a short list with a brief idea of what each package is and whether it’s running late, delivered or postponed. It doesn’t go item by item on orders with several things in them.

• Data broker removal. Data broker sites collect and sell personal details like names, addresses and phone numbers. Getting off them is slow, repetitive work that’s easy to put off. This bot searched the sites and found my public information on 8 of them. It submitted removal requests without buying anything or giving them extra information. Then it watched my email and clicked the verification links. My listing is now removed from 4 of the 8. The rest either refused or blocked the bot’s traffic. The ones that refused said Washington law doesn’t require them to remove it at my request. On one site it got stuck on a CAPTCHA (the “prove you’re human” test). So did I, so I think that’s a bug on their end. It runs again every quarter to catch new sites. It also added my phone numbers to the national Do Not Call Registry (donotcall.gov).

• Travel. It hasn’t booked anything. I’d consider trying that later with a card. What it did was research and plan the logistics for a family trip and build the itinerary: Boston, around to Salem, then back to Boston to fly home, hitting the major things we wanted to do. It also spotted the hotel and car reservation confirmations in my email and added them to the calendar.

• A few more. One nudges me to make time for my relationship. It looks at local activities, the weather and when we’re both free, then suggests date ideas or time to connect. Others do market research for a digital product idea. And one looks for consulting leads among internet providers, the industry I came from.

What this could look like in a small business

In an office, the same idea might be one bot that pulls tracking numbers out of supplier emails so you know when parts are coming, another that flags new quote requests, and another that gets appointments onto the calendar. Each one is small enough that the person who used to do the chore can check it. Small bots like these are part of what I set up as custom AI integrations and automations.

The privacy question I raised about email triage applies here too. Any bot that reads your email to find tracking codes or travel plans is seeing everything else in there. Decide that on purpose.