n8n Google Drive → Cognee Company Brain + OpenAI Chat

Ask questions across your PDFs in minutes—using Google Drive, Cognee’s Company Brain, and an OpenAI GPT-4o-mini agent

This n8n workflow ingests a PDF from Google Drive into a Cognee company_brain dataset and then answers questions via an OpenAI (gpt-4o-mini) agent. You can chat from the n8n chat UI or a Slack channel—and receive replies back in Slack when applicable, with workflow errors automatically posted to a Slack alert channel.

What this workflow does

• Ingest PDF content on demand: Manually start an ingestion run to download the specified PDF from Google Drive, extract its text, and add it to Cognee as the company_brain dataset.
• Answer questions from chat: Trigger on a message in the n8n chat UI or when a new message appears in a configured Slack channel.
• Search and respond with context: Send the user’s question to an OpenAI gpt-4o-mini agent that uses a Cognee search tool to retrieve relevant context from the company_brain knowledge graph, while maintaining short-term conversation memory.
• Route responses correctly: If the question originated from Slack, reply in the Slack channel; if it originated from the n8n chat trigger, set the output field for the chat UI.
• Alert on failures: If any node/workflow fails, format the error details and post a structured alert to a designated Slack error channel.

Use cases

• Enable teams to ask company policy, product, or research questions directly about a PDF stored in Google Drive.
• Support fast internal Q&A in Slack without manually searching documents.
• Give SaaS operators a controlled workflow that keeps answers grounded in Cognee’s searchable knowledge graph.

Technical details

• Nodes/logic: if, set, slack, n8n-nodes-cogneecognee (ingestion + search), sticky note, google drive
• Credentials required: Cognee API (ingestion & search), Google Drive OAuth2, OpenAI API (gpt-4o-mini), and Slack OAuth2 (triggers, replies, error notifications).
• Configuration: update YOUR_DRIVE_FILE_ID with the Google Drive PDF file ID to ingest.