Like most business development professionals, my calendar is packed: meetings, follow-ups, research, events, proposal deadlines, rinse and repeat. It’s all there, but parsing through it to find what actually happened each week — what I spent time on, what moved the needle, what didn’t — was not easy. I wanted a system that would automatically review my calendar and summarize the week. Not just a list. A report.

Once Upon a Time: The Weekly Task I Loved to Hate
Once upon a time, there was a weekly task that frequently went unloved and unappreciated. In fact, it got shoved right onto the back burner the moment it crossed my mind: the Business Development activity summary. I had started off emailing these updates regularly to my boss and supervisor, but as you might imagine, it was a tedious and time-consuming task — often taking two hours or more. Eventually, my updates became less frequent, and yes, it got noticed. My boss gently reminded me that this was something I needed to do if I wanted to keep pushing toward the promotion I’d been working hard for. Around that time, I was diving into articles about AI workflows, and the idea of automating this dreaded task began to take shape.

Step 1: Automating What I Could with Power Automate I started with a Power Automate flow:

1. Every Friday, pull calendar events from the past 7 days
2. Categorize them by color (Client Meetings = Blue, Strategy = Red, Outreach = Green, etc.)
3. Output the results into a table
4. Email the summary to myself

Did it work? Technically, yes. But it wasn’t as intuitive as I’d hoped. The formatting was finicky. Categorization logic required some trial and error. And there was no native way to visualize the data.

Here’s what it created below:

Step 2: The AI Hack That Changed the Game
I snapped a screenshot of my color-coded calendar and uploaded it to ChatGPT.
Within minutes, it had:

• Extracted and organized the data
• Analyzed time allocations
• Created pie charts
• Wrote a clean summary I could copy straight into a report

My calendar had become a living infographic. AI helped me zoom out, spot patterns, and report insights — all from a weekly screenshot.

Step 3: Looking Ahead — Scaling the System
Now I’m thinking bigger. What if we had a shared Outlook calendar for all BD activities in our office? We could:

• Automatically track where our collective time goes
• Compare time investment to outcomes
• Spot gaps or over-investments across teams or sectors
• Feed it all into a dashboard that updates weekly

It’s not perfect yet. But it’s working. And it’s a reminder that AI and automation don’t have to be flawless to be valuable — they just need to get you closer to clarity.