Every week, you draft your emails from scratch using the meeting notes. What if you could turn this task and others into a repeatable workflow that processes your input and prepares a result for you to review? In this lesson, you'll learn how to turn everything you've practiced into repeatable workflows using Shortcuts.

Everything you've used so far works one task at a time. You pick the text, choose the tool, and review the result. Shortcuts lets you chain those steps together into a workflow that runs automatically. Instead of doing five things in sequence, you can trigger the workflow with one tap, then review any generated content or requested actions before completing the task.

Shortcuts is available on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Your shortcuts stay synced across devices when iCloud Sync is turned on.

The fastest way to get started is with ready-made shortcuts. Open the Shortcuts app, tap Gallery, and look for the Apple Intelligence category.

You'll find many shortcuts, like "Morning Summary," "Leftover Recipes," "Summarize PDF," and more — each one built to show you how Apple Intelligence fits into a workflow.

Tap any shortcut to see how it's built before adding it to your collection. This is the best way to learn: you can see which actions are used and how data flows from one step to the next. These are the templates you can study, run, and then customize.

Let's walk through the logic of a shortcut that turns your rough notes into a polished email draft. This shortcut can pass selected notes to an AI model, generate an email draft, and open the result in Mail for review.

The flow has three steps: get the input → process it with Apple Intelligence → send the output somewhere useful.

Let's see how it works on macOS. On iPhone, the workflow and the interface are similar: Step 1: Open Shortcuts App, click File → New Shortcut. Or open All Shortcuts and choose +.

Step 2: Add a "Find Notes" action from the action section on the right, then add a "Choose from List" action right after it. This way, when you run the shortcut, it shows you a list of all your notes and lets you pick the one you want to turn into an email.

The real power comes from an action called Use Model. It lets supported shortcuts send compatible input to an available AI model and pass the result to another action.

Use Model is the action that brings Apple Intelligence into your shortcuts. If ChatGPT is selected, the input is shared with OpenAI according to the user's ChatGPT extension settings.

Step 3: Add a "Use Model" action, set it to On-Device, Private Cloud Compute, or ChatGPT.

When you add Use Model, you choose which model to use:

For this example, ChatGPT can be selected for open-ended drafting if the user is comfortable sharing the note content with OpenAI. Another available model can be used instead where appropriate.

Step 4: Type an instruction like "Turn this note into a polished professional email with a subject line, key points, and a clear closing."

Step 5: Add a "Send Mail" action. It opens a new email compose window with the model's response already filled in as the body. Review it, adjust the recipients and subject if needed, and hit send. Review the generated body, recipients, and subject before sending.

Once built, run this shortcut from the Shortcuts app, assign it to the Action button or Lock Screen on iPhone, or trigger it with Siri by saying the shortcut's name.

Shortcuts can also run automatically when triggered by events. Go to Shortcuts → Automation → + and pick a trigger. It can be:

The power of Shortcuts is connecting them. Each action's output becomes the next action's input. This means you can build workflows that go far beyond a single task.

Examples of what chained shortcuts can do:

In each case, the pattern is the same: input → Apple Intelligence processing → output to another app. Once you see this pattern, you can design workflows for recurring tasks supported by the available apps, actions, permissions, and data types.

The best shortcut ideas come from tasks you already repeat every week. Think about what you do regularly that involves multiple steps, multiple apps, or the same type of content. If you can describe the task as "every time I get X, I do Y, then Z" — that's a shortcut waiting to be built.

Some starting points:

Each of these may be suitable for a shortcut when the required apps and actions are supported. The same three-step pattern can be used: get the content, process it with Apple Intelligence, and send the result to the right place.

You've gone from using Apple Intelligence one feature at a time to building workflows that chain those features together. One last check before you go — let's make sure the key concepts from this lesson stick.

Apple Intelligence is already inside the apps you use every day. You now know how to find it, use it, and build it into the way you work. That's not a small thing — most people never get past the first feature. In turn, you've explored a practical selection of supported Apple Intelligence features and workflows. Now make it work for you!