n8n Workflow: Extract Meeting Action Items to Slack & Sheets

Turn meeting transcripts into Slack alerts and a live action tracker

This n8n workflow watches a Google Drive folder for newly added meeting transcript files, uses OpenAI to extract decisions and action items, deduplicates them against your “open actions” Google Sheet, and posts run summaries (or parsing errors) to a Slack channel.

What this workflow does

• Detects new transcripts: Triggers when a new file is created in a specific Google Drive folder.
• Prevents duplicate processing: Downloads the file, extracts its text, computes a transcript fingerprint, and checks n8n’s Data Table to stop if the same transcript was already processed.
• Extracts structured outcomes with OpenAI: Sends the transcript text to OpenAI to return structured JSON including decisions and action items (such as owner, due date, and an exact supporting quote when present).
• Handles parsing failures safely: If OpenAI parsing fails, it logs transcript details to a “dead-letter” Data Table and posts an alert to Slack.
• Notifies when nothing is found (optional): If no decisions or actions are captured, it can post a “no actions captured” notice to Slack and still records the transcript as processed.
• Deduplicates and updates your tracker: Reads existing open items from a Google Sheets tracker, compares new actions using text similarity, then either updates an existing row as “raised again” or appends a new action item.
• Upserts processing state: Aggregates counts (decisions, created actions, linked duplicates, unassigned owners) and upserts the transcript fingerprint into the processed-transcripts Data Table.

Use cases

• SaaS teams converting every meeting transcript into an auditable action list in Google Sheets.
• Operations and customer success teams quickly notifying Slack when new decisions or action items are detected.
• Automation engineers needing a reliable “dead-letter + alert” pattern for OpenAI extraction failures.

Technical details

• Triggers & integrations: Google Drive (folder watch), Google Sheets (open actions tracker), Slack (summaries/alerts), OpenAI (structured extraction).
• Core n8n components/nodes used: if, set, code, merge, slack, data table.
• Required credentials: OAuth2 for Google Drive and Google Sheets, Slack OAuth, and an OpenAI API credential for the OpenAI chat model.