Zapier (Copilot and AI Agents)

Teaches process automation and systems thinking concretely — students see a business process decomposed into triggers and actions rather than described abstractly. The free tier plus free Copilot and 400 free agent activities is enough for a real assignment at zero cost. Skills transfer directly: operations and marketing roles increasingly list Zapier or an equivalent.

Mapping a manual business process such as lead intake or expense approval, then building and testing a working automation and documenting what broke. Using Copilot to generate an automation from a plain-English description, then auditing it for the error handling the AI ignored. Building a lead-routing workflow and deliberately feeding it bad data to find where it fails.

The 100-task monthly free cap is consumed quickly during testing and debugging, which is exactly when students need the most runs. AI-generated automations frequently omit error handling and can silently fail or duplicate records, so unsupervised student automations touching real accounts are risky. Separate pricing for Agents on top of plan pricing makes true cost confusing to explain.