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- 🎮 The Next Input — Issue #031
🎮 The Next Input — Issue #031
Your SOPs Are Dead. Here's How to Fix Them.
Aaron Bost
August 13, 2025
In partnership with
⚡ The Briefing — 60 sec
ChatGPT’s model picker is back Model picker returns — otherwise known as “we f’d up.”
Perplexity and Chrome? Didn’t see that one coming… browser wars just got spicy.
Anthropic announces 1M context window The AI arms race isn’t cooling down anytime soon.
🛠️ The Playbook — Slack-First Smart SOP Bot
Mission Turn your static SOPs into interactive, self-healing assistants your team actually uses.
Difficulty Intermediate | Build time 90 min
ROI Reduces repetitive “how do I” questions in Slack by ≈ 70% and keeps documentation fresh without manual audits.
Step | Action |
|---|---|
1 | Trigger – User asks a process question in Slack ( |
2 | Parser – Slack bot sends query to RAG service with Notion as the knowledge base. |
3 | Router – If an answer is found → return exact SOP step + action buttons; if not → create update ticket for SOP owner. |
4 | Formatter – Format answer with heading, numbered steps, and quick links to forms/templates. |
5 | Destination – Post response in Slack thread and update usage logs. |
6 | Notification – Weekly digest to SOP owners with unanswered questions + suggested updates. |
7 | Fail-safe – If Notion API is down, bot returns “manual lookup” link to SOP index. |
Pro tip: Start with your top 3 SOPs by question volume before rolling out to the entire company.
🗺️ The Side Quest
Each week, we answer a question from a reader. This week, we're fixing a universal business problem: dead documents.
This week's question:
"My team writes Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) in Notion, but they quickly become outdated, and honestly, no one reads them. People still just ask their questions in Slack anyway. How can I use AI to create 'Smart SOPs' that are interactive, easy to update, and that my team will actually use?"
Answer:
This is a problem every scaling business faces. The solution is to stop thinking of an SOP as a static page and start treating it as an intelligent service.
A "Smart SOP" isn't a document you read; it's a system you interact with. It must be:
Askable: It answers natural-language questions in Slack with citations to the exact step.
Actionable: It can trigger checklists, templates, or workflows directly from the chat interface.
Accountable: It tracks unanswered questions and automatically proposes updates to its owner.
Here’s the blueprint to build one.
First, fix the source. The core mindset is: "Every important doc needs one clear home. Everything else can go." Before you do anything else, be ruthless. Archive or delete all old, duplicate, and trivial files. Then, label your "Source of Truth" documents with a clear naming convention (e.g., SOT-2025-07-Budget-FINAL). Your AI is only as smart as the data you feed it.
Next, structure your SOPs for the AI. Use a consistent scaffold with clear, simple headings like ## Purpose, ## Step-By-Step, and ## Decision Points. This allows the AI to parse the document and find precise answers instead of just summarizing a wall of text.
Then, build the interactive layer. The best place to start is in Slack. Set up a simple bot (@SOP-Bot) that uses a light RAG (Retrieval- Augmented Generation) layer to query your Notion database. When a user asks, "How do I issue a refund over $1k?", the bot should provide the exact step and offer action buttons like "Open Refund Form" or "Create Checklist."
Finally, make it self-healing. The bot should automatically create a ticket for the SOP owner whenever it can't answer a question, suggesting an update to the source document. This closes the loop and ensures your documentation never goes stale again.
The first Smart SOP you should build? Your New-Hire Onboarding guide. The question volume is high, it touches every team, and turning it into an interactive, self-serve tool provides a massive and immediate win.
🎯 The Arsenal — Tools & Prompts
Asset | What it does | Link |
|---|---|---|
Slack Bot API | Captures user queries in Slack. | |
Notion API | Stores and retrieves SOP content. | |
OpenAI GPT-4o + RAG | Answers questions with precise citations. |
Prompt · SOP Query Resolver
You are a company SOP assistant. Given a question and access to SOP content, return the exact step(s) that answer the query with citations. If the answer is missing, respond with "No match found" and suggest an update to the SOP owner.
💡 Free Office Hours
Want to deploy your own Smart SOP bot for Slack?
Book a free 15-minute Office Hours slot—no sales pitch, just workflows solved.
Big investors are buying this “unlisted” stock
When the founder who sold his last company to Zillow for $120M starts a new venture, people notice. That’s why the same VCs who backed Uber, Venmo, and eBay also invested in Pacaso.
Disrupting the real estate industry once again, Pacaso’s streamlined platform offers co-ownership of premier properties, revamping the $1.3T vacation home market.
And it works. By handing keys to 2,000+ happy homeowners, Pacaso has already made $110M+ in gross profits in their operating history.
Now, after 41% YoY gross profit growth last year alone, they recently reserved the Nasdaq ticker PCSO.
Paid advertisement for Pacaso’s Regulation A offering. Read the offering circular at invest.pacaso.com. Reserving a ticker symbol is not a guarantee that the company will go public. Listing on the NASDAQ is subject to approvals.
🕹️ Game Over
Pick one SOP your team asks about weekly — turn it into a Smart SOP by next Wednesday.
— Aaron
Automating the boring. Amplifying the brilliant.
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