Slack Research Agent Workflow (n8n) with OpenAI + Apify MCP

Turn Slack questions into researched, cited answers—automatically

This Slack Research Agent Workflow (n8n) listens for Slack @mentions, uses an OpenAI-powered agent to plan the research, then pulls live web data via Apify MCP to respond with source URLs directly in the same Slack thread.

What this workflow does

• Slack Trigger: Starts when the Slack app is mentioned in a channel the bot has joined (event: app_mention).
• Mention cleanup: Cleans the mention text to extract the user’s research question.
• OpenAI agent + per-thread context: Uses an OpenAI chat model through an n8n LangChain agent with short-term, per-thread memory so follow-up questions keep relevant context.
• Apify MCP web research: Calls Apify MCP tools (including the RAG Web Browser and a Google Search scraper, plus other Apify Actors as needed) to gather live web content and source URLs.
• Threaded response: Synthesizes the answer with citations and posts it back to Slack in the original thread.

Use cases

• Answering “What’s the latest on X?” questions from your team—without leaving Slack.
• Rapid internal research for SaaS operators (competitor updates, feature comparisons, market notes) with cited sources.
• Supporting automation engineers with evidence-backed answers to technical questions, using live web lookups.

Technical details

• Integrations required: Slack, Apify, OpenAI accounts.
• n8n nodes / components: Slack Trigger, Slack (chat:write + app_mentions:read), LangChain Agent (n8nn8n-nodes-langchainagent), OpenAI chat model (n8nn8n-nodes-langchainlm chat open ai), Apify MCP client tools (n8nn8n-nodes-langchainmcp client tool), plus a Slack-compatible context note via a Sticky Note node.
• Setup: Provide Slack Bot Token to Slack nodes, add OpenAI API key in the OpenAI node, and configure an Apify API token as an HTTP Bearer credential for the Apify MCP tools endpoint. Register the webhook URL in Slack Event Subscriptions for app_mention.

Bring research workflows directly into Slack—with an n8n agent, OpenAI reasoning, and Apify MCP-powered web sources.