Building AI News Assistant with n8n

After hitting some walls trying to build AI agents from scratch or using platforms that didn't quite fit, I started looking at visual tools that offered more flexibility, like n8n.

My goal was personal this time. Every morning, I'd wake up and spend way too much time scrolling through social media, reading blogs, or watching videos just to keep up with the latest news on Vision models, AI Agents, and LLMs.

Honestly, it was exhausting, especially when half the effort just told me something obvious, like maybe OpenAI didn't release a new miracle overnight(o3 and o4 mini)!

I really wanted an AI agent that could handle this for me.

My dream setup: An automated assistant that gathers all the important AI buzz from the previous day and creates a neat little newsletter summary for me to read over breakfast. No more endless scrolling!

So, I thought, how would I design this using a visual tool like n8n? Looking at the kind of workflow diagram shown earlier, here’s how I'd set up my AI news assistant:

Creating My Automated Flow

n8n workflow

Building this in n8n felt pretty logical, step-by-step:

Set the Alarm Clock

First, I needed it to run automatically every morning. I used n8n's Schedule Trigger. I set it to run daily at, say, 7:00 AM, giving it enough time to gather news before my breakfast. This trigger gets the whole process moving each day.

Wake Up the First AI Agent: When the schedule triggers, it activates my first AI Agent node. I thought of this agent as my initial researcher.

To give it a brain, I connected it to an AI model, the Google Gemini Chat Model seemed like a good choice for understanding and processing text.

I also added a Simple Memory node so it could remember things if needed, maybe like topics I covered yesterday. This first agent basically gets the ball rolling.

Grab the News from Reddit

Next, I needed the actual news. I added the Reddit node to my workflow.

I told it specifically which subreddits to check, maybe r/MachineLearning, r/computervision, and r/LocalLLaMA – to fetch the top posts and discussions from the last 24 hours.

Let the Second AI Agent Write the Summary

With the latest Reddit info gathered, I sent it over to a Second AI Agent.

This agent acts as my writer and summarizer. I connected it to another Google Gemini Chat Model (or maybe the same one, configured differently).

Its job was to read all those Reddit posts, identify the key news and trends, and write a concise summary – my personal newsletter draft.

It also got its own Simple Memory node to help manage the writing process.

Finally, I needed to get the summary. Instead of connecting the second agent to Twitter like in the example diagram, I connected it to a Slack node (or you could use an Email node).

I configured it to send the finished summary directly to my personal Slack channel each morning.

How This Workflow Helps Me

Setting it up this way created exactly what I wanted:

It automatically checks Reddit for the latest AI news every single day.
It uses AI (Gemini) to intelligently summarize the important stuff.
It delivers the summary right to my Slack before breakfast.
The whole process runs on schedule without me lifting a finger.
Using two agents made sense; one gathered the info, the other focused on writing the summary.

My Thoughts on Using n8n

Looking back at building this workflow, I found n8n really effective for this kind of task. Here's why I think it worked well:

Visual Design is Easy: Connecting the blocks (Scheduler, Agent, Reddit, Slack) visually made the whole process clear and easy to manage.
Great Connections: n8n connected smoothly to Reddit's API and the Google Gemini model. Adding the Slack output was just dragging another block.
Automation Made Simple: Setting up the schedule and letting it run automatically was straightforward.

From my experience building this, n8n feels very flexible but still user-friendly, even if you're not a top-tier developer. It let me connect the different services I needed (Reddit, Gemini, Slack) pretty easily.

For creating an AI agent flow like my news summarizer, n8n felt powerful enough and quite practical.

If I were building something incredibly complex, maybe needing dozens of agents interacting in super sophisticated ways, I might eventually look at more specialized tools, but for this task and many others like it, n8n seems to hit a great sweet spot.

Common Questions I Asked Myself

While building this, a few things came to mind:

What are the essential parts?

I definitely needed the Scheduler, the AI Agent blocks (with an AI model like Gemini connected), the Reddit node to get data, and the Slack/Email node to get the result. The memory blocks were helpful but maybe not strictly necessary for a simple daily summary.

Could I make it better?

For sure! I could add more steps easily. Maybe add another agent to check tech news websites besides Reddit. Or add a step to analyse if the news seemed positive or negative. Or even filter out posts I've already seen. n8n makes chaining these steps together pretty simple.

Easy – just replace the Slack node with an Email node, or maybe even a Telegram or Discord node if I preferred.

Is n8n good enough if this gets bigger?

For this kind of automated summary or response task, absolutely. It seems capable of handling quite a bit. If I were building, say, a fully interactive AI team for a large company, I might need to re-evaluate, but for personal or most business automations, it feels very capable.

Conclusion

This experience really made me feel like 2025 is the year AI agents are becoming truly practical tools, not just hype.

Using a platform like n8n showed me that even someone like me, who isn't necessarily a specialised AI researcher, can build powerful automations.

I could connect different services, use strong AI models for analysis, and get useful results delivered automatically.

For my goal of staying updated on AI news without drowning in information, building this automated newsletter workflow felt like a perfect, efficient solution brought to life by today's accessible AI agent tools.

FAQs

What is n8n?

n8n is an open-source workflow automation tool that allows users to connect various services and automate tasks without writing code.

How can I build an AI News Assistant with n8n?

You can create a workflow in n8n that fetches RSS feeds from news sources, parses the content, filters for specific topics, summarizes the articles using AI models, and delivers the summaries to your chosen platform.

Do I need coding skills to use n8n?

No, n8n provides a visual interface to create workflows, making it accessible for users without coding experience.

Can I integrate AI models like GPT with n8n?

Yes, n8n supports integration with AI models such as OpenAI's GPT, allowing you to add AI-powered functionalities like text summarization to your workflows.

Is it possible to self-host n8n?

Yes, n8n offers a self-hosted option, giving you control over your workflows and data.