When processing new orders, customers often provide their appointment availability in messy, unstructured formats (like "next Tuesday afternoon" or "July 15th at 2 PM"). This guide explains how to use AI to automatically extract these dates, identify the earliest available day, and format them perfectly for your Monday.com boards.

Here is a high-level look at the data flow:

flowchart TD
    A["Raw Appointment Preferences"] --> B["AI Extraction Step"]
    B --> C{"Were valid dates found?"}
    C -- Yes --> D["Format as YYYY-MM-DD"]
    C -- No --> E["Fallback to Today's Date"]
    E --> D
    D --> F["Sync to Monday.com"]

How it works

To reliably push dates into Monday.com, the raw text must be parsed, validated, and reformatted. We achieve this using a multi-step automation process.

1. 1

   Extract dates with AI

   Pass the raw scheduling notes to an AI step. The AI is instructed to ignore times, extract only the dates, and return both a full list of options and the earliest available date.

2. 2

   Check for empty results

   Calculate the length of the AI's "1st Availability Date" output. If the length is 0 (meaning the AI couldn't find any valid dates), the workflow prepares to use a fallback value.

3. 3

   Apply the fallback (if needed)

   Use a Lookup Table step. If the date string is empty, replace it with the current date ({{zap_meta_human_now}}). Otherwise, keep the AI's extracted date.

4. 4

   Format for Monday.com

   Monday.com requires a strict YYYY-MM-DD format. Pass the final date through a Date/Time formatter to ensure it matches this exact structure before syncing.

AI Configuration

To get the most accurate results from the AI extraction step, use a structured prompt and define a strict output schema.

Output Schema

Configure your AI step to return these two specific fields:

Recommended Prompt

If you are building this automation from scratch, you can copy and paste the exact prompt we use to instruct the AI.

You are a master of date and time analysis and you are asked to process a list of date-time items.

Given the following list of date and time items:
{{1__ApptPref}}

Your task is to:
1. Extract only the dates from each item and format them as MM/DD/YY.
2. Create a comma-separated followed by a space list of these formatted dates.
3. Identify the earliest date from the list

Limitations and requirements:
- Only include the dates, not the times.
- Ensure all dates are in the MM/DD/YY format.
- If a date is invalid or cannot be parsed, exclude it from the list.
- If the list is empty or contains no valid dates, return empty strings for both outputs.

<example>
Input:
July 15, 2023 2:30 PM
08/22/2023 10:00 AM
2023-09-01 15:45
June 5, 2023 9:00 AM

Output:
1. Comma-separated list of dates: 07/15/23, 08/22/23, 09/01/2023, 06/05/23
2. Date of first availability: 06/05/23
</example>

Next Steps

Once your dates are standardized, you can map them directly into your Monday.com item creation steps.