Hey Claire. I’d expect an action involving Integormat, a webhook, or any other service outside of Airtable, to be a slower process. In addition to whatever those services are helping you do, just sending/receiving data to that outside service will slow things down a bit. In other words, anything making network requests has the potential to degrade performance. That’s doubly the case if those services are waiting for each other to execute, or if what they’re doing is slow.
Alternative Approaches
I’d take a closer look at each of the steps the Automation is completing in isolation, then see if they could be replaced with faster approaches. For instance, would it be reasonable to use a script instead of Integromat, webhooks etc? If all the code lives within Airtable, it can execute much faster.
Or, if Integromat/Webhooks are essential, you could replace whatever ‘Automations’ does with a script. That script would still need to slowly make network requests, but you could have it run for more than just one record at a time.