How To Use N8N Workflows with AI Agent to Boost Your Work Efficiency
Today, I’m sharing an N8N workflow I frequently use, and also introducing everyone to the N8N tool. It’s 2025, and I can’t believe anyone still doesn’t know about this incredibly powerful efficiency-boosting tool.
This workflow can automatically scrape pain points related to your industry from Reddit, and have an AI agent summarize these points and organize them into a Google Sheet. This way, when we write articles, we know what content our potential customers are interested in, and we can tailor our article topics more towards these pain points.
Let’s first take a general look at this N8N Workflow I’m using.
The workflow is as follows:
- Manually trigger the workflow to start. You can also set it to trigger automatically on a fixed day each week.
- Set the keywords to scrape and the subreddits to access, collecting raw data from these subreddits.
- Aggregate the information collected and organized from various subreddits in Step 2.
- Use an AI Agent to analyze and summarize the raw information. This AI Agent node is the core of the entire workflow. In this node, you need to tell the AI model the task to be processed and the desired results.
- The final step exports the pain points summarized by the AI directly to Google Sheets.
Let’s look at the product pain points automatically summarized by the AI Agent.
The entire process took only 1 minute, significantly improving the efficiency of my previous manual research for identifying customer pain points on Reddit. It’s incredibly efficient.
Alright, so what exactly is this N8N tool, and how is it so powerful?
First, you need to understand what a workflow is. A workflow is a process you design to let machines handle repetitive tasks. You might have heard of tools like IFTTT, Make, or Zapier. They are all workflow automation tools. Essentially, we can design any workflow we want using these tools.
But why do I specifically recommend N8N to everyone?
Main reasons:
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N8N is an open-source workflow tool.
Being open-source means you can design any workflow freely and without cost. This is similar to why over 60% of global companies choose WordPress for their website platform – because WP is an open-source program that maximizes freedom to implement any functionality you want. Another advantage of open-source is that it attracts enthusiasts who contribute free templates and nodes, which you can freely install and use. Some free workflow templates, as long as they meet your functional requirements, can be imported and used directly. For example, the Reddit pain point workflow I showed above was found among the templates.
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Low-code design platform.
This means you can complete over 90% of workflow tasks without any coding knowledge. You just need to learn a workflow mindset and connect the nodes together, which is as fun as building with LEGOs.
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You can deploy it on a local server or on a cloud server.
This is very much like being able to set up WordPress locally or directly on a cloud server.
Who is N8N Most Suitable For?
Digital Marketers
One of the biggest uses of N8N is helping digital marketers automate marketing tasks. This includes, but is not limited to, automated image/video production, Google keyword search volume analysis, and analyzing data from Google Search Console and Google Analytics 4 for independent websites. Tasks that previously relied entirely on manual labor and human analysis to provide solutions can now be handed over to N8N’s AI Agent for automated completion.
People Interested in Automation
No matter what industry you are in, you can learn about workflow automation. I believe that every service-oriented company in the future will need talent skilled in workflow automation because it increases efficiency and reduces costs – put more bluntly, it optimizes human resource costs. N8N is just a tool; more important than mastering the tool is the process thinking – the problem-solving mindset designed to address a specific issue, manifested through the workflow tool.
Solopreneurs / Micro-SaaS Companies
The so-called “solopreneur” is essentially an individual business owner, but this owner has virtual employees and assistants. You can build N8N into your own execution assistant, handing all tedious and repetitive tasks over to N8N. As the boss, your energy can be fully focused on identifying needs and designing processes.
PS: The solopreneur model is more suitable for light-asset service companies like consulting or software. Traditional manufacturing relies more on human labor.
Methodology for Learning N8N
Here’s some advice from my learning experience for your reference:
- Go to YouTube and search for “N8N Workflow Guide”. Watching 1-2 videos should be enough to get the basics.
- Immediately start by deploying N8N following a video tutorial. Begin by building your first simple workflow.
- Find workflow templates closely related to your business. Copy them directly into your own N8N instance and start modifying the node parameters until the entire workflow runs successfully.
For example, you can search for SEO-related workflow templates in the templates section.
Find a template that relatively meets your needs and click to use it for free.
Overall, the learning curve for N8N is not high. Going from zero knowledge to running a complete workflow can be achieved in just a few hours.
The cost is also very low; the main expense is the cloud server, costing around $5-6 USD per month, which is enough for beginners to experiment with.
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