Building AI-Powered n8n Workflows with OpenAI

Why n8n + OpenAI?

n8n gives you the orchestration layer; OpenAI gives you the intelligence layer. Together they let you build AI agents that run on autopilot.

Prerequisites

• n8n instance (cloud or self-hosted)
• OpenAI API key (gpt-4o model recommended)
• Basic familiarity with JSON

Workflow 1 — Blog Draft Generator

Trigger (Schedule, weekly)
  → HTTP Request (fetch trending topics from RSS)
  → OpenAI Node (generate 500-word draft)
  → Google Docs Node (create new doc)
  → Slack Node (notify #content channel)

Key settings for the OpenAI node:

{
  "model": "gpt-4o",
  "temperature": 0.7,
  "max_tokens": 1200,
  "system": "You are a senior content writer for a SaaS blog."
}

Workflow 2 — Support Ticket Classifier

1. Webhook receives new ticket JSON from Zendesk.
2. OpenAI classifies intent: billing, bug, feature_request, other.
3. Switch node routes to the correct Slack channel.
4. IF priority is urgent, also page on-call via PagerDuty.

Workflow 3 — Lead Enrichment

• Trigger: new row in Google Sheets
• OpenAI: extract company domain, industry, and size from a raw text field
• HTTP Request: call Clearbit API for enrichment
• Update the same Google Sheets row with structured data

Tips for Production

• Cache responses to avoid redundant API calls.
• Set retry logic on the OpenAI node (3 retries, exponential back-off).
• Use sub-workflows to keep each AI step modular.

Explore more automation patterns in our webhook automation patterns guide.