How to document career wins in Slack with Zapier Agents

If you’re like me, you’ve had moments at work that you’re genuinely proud of: projects that moved the needle, efforts that supported the team, or insights from a thoughtful experiment. But when performance review season rolls around, those wins are often forgotten footnotes lost in the Slack-verse.

You think you’ll remember. Or at least, I always think I’ll remember. But months later when you need to make the case for yourself, you end up digging through chat histories like an archaeologist, trying to reconstruct impact from call-outs and half-buried threads.

The solution is automation. Using Zapier’s powerful AI orchestration platform, I built an AI agent that automatically logs wins from Slack.

Whenever I react to a relevant message with an emoji, the agent pulls the full thread, analyzes the conversation, and appends a clear, performance-ready summary to a Google Doc. No manual tracking. No forgotten wins.

Watch my demo below to see how it works, or keep reading for step-by-step instructions.

How to set up a career wins agent

In this example, I’ll start with a template in Zapier Agents. You can (and should) customize the template according to your own career, but we’ll keep things simple for this guide. 

Click on the button below, then follow the steps to customize your agent.

Step 1: Activate your template 

To get started, you first need to open the template in Zapier Agents.  

• Click Use template on the template landing page.

• Review a summary of the template’s functions, then click Use this template to get started. 

Step 2: Set up your agent’s trigger

The trigger step is set by default to Slack: New Reaction Added. To configure this, you’ll need to:

• Click Slack: New Reaction Added in the trigger field, then connect your Slack account when prompted. 

• Under Reaction, select the emoji you’d like to use as your trigger for summarizing Slack threads. I use a custom emoji (:blob-notes:), but you can set it to whatever works best for you. 

• Next, under Member ID, search for and select your Slack ID from the dropdown menu. You can just type out your name to surface your ID. 

• Click Save once you’ve finished customizing these fields. 

Step 3: Review the agent’s behavior

Now you can review and customize what your agent does under Instructions. By default, your agent is designed to:

• Analyze the full Slack thread conversation when you react to a thread, retrieving all messages within it.

• Identify and summarize the main topic or project discussed, focusing specifically on relevance to your responsibilities and performance tracking.

• Highlight your individual contributions or mentions if explicitly included in the conversation, emphasizing how they align with your performance or goals.

• Exclude off-topic or unrelated chatter to maintain a clear, concise summary focused solely on work-relevant content.

• Format the output clearly, specifying the date, a short summary of the discussion, context for why the thread matters (such as updates, decisions, or feedback), and a direct link to the Slack thread.

Make any needed changes to the instructions to make documenting your personal wins work best for your role or use case.

Step 4: Configure your agent’s actions

With your trigger and instructions set, the next step is to connect the apps your agent will use when it takes action for you. In this example, that means Slack and Google Docs.

Set up your Slack action

• In your Instructions panel, click the Slack: Retrieve Thread Messages pill. This action pulls in every message from the thread you reacted to, so the agent has full context—not just the single message.

• Keep the Conversation ID and Thread Timestamp fields set to Let your agent select a value for this field. The agent will automatically know which conversation and thread to pull based on the trigger step, so you don’t need to manually set those fields.

• Click Save.

Set up your Google Docs action

• Click the Google Docs: Append Text to Document pill. This action allows your agent to log the thread summary in a doc so you can track performance highlights all in one place. 

• Connect your Google Drive account. 

• Under Document Name, select Set a specific value for this field, then choose the exact Google Doc where you want summaries saved. Your agent will append each new summary here automatically.

• For the Text to Append field, keep it set to Let your agent generate a value for this field. This lets the agent output your formatted summary based on your Instructions.

• Under Drive, select Set a specific value for this field and select your Google drive so the agent knows where to find the document.

• Keep Folder set to Let your agent select a value for this field unless your document lives inside a specific folder you want to target.

• Finally, under Append Text on New Line?, select Use default: true. This ensures each new summary is added on a new line so things stay readable.

• Click Save when you’re done.

Your agent will now know exactly where to send your Slack summaries in a way that’s clean, organized, and ready to reference later.

Step 5: Test and deploy your agent

Now it’s time to test your agent’s performance in the preview panel on the right-hand side. Click Test agent. 

Your agent will now test each action you’ve set up. This lets you see what’s working and highlights any areas where you might need to adjust your instructions. Every step of the way, you can further refine your instructions by chatting with the agent directly in the preview panel.

If everything looks good, you can turn on your agent. Next time you want to log a performance-relevant conversation, just react to the Slack thread with your chosen emoji—and your agent will take care of the rest.

Record your impact automatically

Before this, prepping for performance reviews meant digging through endless Slack threads and trying to remember what actually mattered. Now, you don’t have to rely on memory or manual tracking. This agent gives you a real-time, running log of your contributions. That way, when review season hits, you’ve already got the receipts.

Have another task you’d like to start streamlining? Start experimenting with Agents today and see what other handy use cases you can come up with.