AI Morning Briefing Workflow: Google Calendar + Gmail + OpenAI

Get a weekday AI morning briefing—automatically from Google Calendar + Gmail

This n8n workflow runs every weekday morning to pull your today’s Google Calendar events and your recent unread Gmail messages, then uses an OpenAI-compatible chat completions API to generate a short, plain-text briefing. It sends the result to your email via Gmail, so you start the day with clarity.

What this workflow does

• Schedules & testing: Automatically runs every weekday at 7:00 AM, with a manual trigger available for testing.
• Reads your settings: Uses your timezone, goal, inbox search filter, model selection, word limit, and the email recipient.
• Pulls Google Calendar: Fetches today’s events from the specified calendar ID.
• Pulls Gmail inbox: Queries unread inbox emails from the last 24 hours using your configured Gmail search filter.
• Prepares the briefing context: Sorts meetings, flags back-to-back events, calculates total meeting time and your longest free focus block, and trims each email to sender/subject/snippet.
• Generates the briefing with OpenAI: Sends calendar + inbox context to an OpenAI-compatible endpoint and produces a three-part plain-text briefing: TODAY, INBOX, and ONE THING (within your word limit).
• Sends via Gmail: Emails the AI output to you; if the AI request fails, it falls back to a plain list.

Use cases

• Busy SaaS operators who want a daily “what matters” summary for meetings and unread threads.
• Automation engineers building n8n workflows that combine calendar context + inbox triage using OpenAI.
• Professionals who prefer a short morning email instead of manually reviewing Google Calendar and Gmail.

Technical details

• n8n nodes / components: set, code, gmail, sticky note, http request, manual trigger.
• Google Calendar: OAuth2 credentials for reading events (calendar ID configurable).
• Gmail: OAuth2 credentials for reading unread emails and sending the briefing.
• LLM access: HTTP Request to an OpenAI-compatible chat completions API using an HTTP header auth credential (e.g., Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY).