Giving an AI employee your own list of stores, customers or sites

To give an AI employee your own list, upload it as a CSV or link a sheet from Google Sheets in the My data block, with one row per place and a name and an address or a position in each row. The employee can then work around each of your places (what opened near each store), skip what is already yours (existing customers left out of a lead list), or check each row on a schedule (has a target account closed or moved). A clean list with positions is the difference between generic results and results about your business.

This is for teams with a spreadsheet of stores, branches, customers, depots or target accounts. It covers what a usable list looks like, the four ways an employee uses one, a made-up example, the mistakes that make lists fail quietly, and the blocks to use.

What a usable list looks like

• One row per place, with a header row naming the columns.
• A name in a column called name, or one called store, site, branch, company or account.
• A position: latitude and longitude columns are best. Without them, a full street address with the city gives each row a position; a city alone places it at the city's centre.
• Your own columns: region, manager, tier, account number. They travel with each item and can appear in the email.
• Within the limits: up to 5,000 rows and 40 columns in a table.

Four ways an employee uses your list

The same table can feed several AI employees at once; update it once and they all follow.

For a one-off job rather than a standing employee, My data's Enrich a list adds positions, rating, phone, website and category to up to 100 rows at a time, with the price shown first.

A worked example

A made-up case: a chain of 18 bike shops in Amsterdam keeps its shops in a spreadsheet with an address and a manager's email for each. It wants every manager to hear when a new bike shop or repair stand opens near them.

1. The spreadsheet is uploaded in the My data block. The rows have no coordinates, so each gets a position from its address. Two rows with only a district name are placed at the district's centre; the operations lead fixes their addresses and uploads again.
2. Nearby places, set to Each incoming place, looks for bike shops and repair shops within 1 km of each store.
3. Only new keeps only places not seen before.
4. Match with my table drops the chain's own shops, which sit within 1 km of each other in the centre and would otherwise come back as competitors.
5. Email, set to one email per item, writes to the manager email column of the store each new shop is near.

In this invented first week, three managers each get one email naming a new shop near them; the other fifteen get nothing, which is correct. Without the step that drops the chain's own shops, every manager would have been told about their colleagues' shops.

Mistakes that make lists fail quietly

• No positions. Rows without coordinates or a usable address still come in, but blocks that search around a place have nothing to search around.
• Vague addresses. A row that says only "City centre" lands at the city's middle. Check the map after the first upload.
• Duplicates. The same store twice means two alerts. Clean the sheet, or put Remove duplicates after My data.
• An old copy. A list uploaded once goes stale. Link a sheet from Google Sheets, or upload again when stores open or close.
• Personal details you do not need. Bring in only the columns the employee uses; leave out personal phone numbers and notes.

How to set it up

1. Open the My data block's settings and upload the CSV or paste the sheet's link. The table is also listed on the My data page.
2. Check the map of the rows for anything out of place.
3. Choose the job: start from the list (My data first), compare against it (Match with my table), or tag results with your nearest site (Find nearest).
4. Add the data and AI blocks the job needs, then Email, Google Sheets or Slack.
5. Run a test and open a few items to see your own columns on them.

What lands in the inbox reads like your own list: each result with your store's name, region or manager beside it. Templates built on your own list include What opens near my stores, Watch my target accounts and Check new merchants from my sheet.