n8n: Open Source Workflow Automation — From Basics to a Working AI Bot in 30 Minutes

Most people assume automation needs backend skills, paid tools, or a lot of time to learn. In this session, I’ll show that it doesn’t.

n8n is an open-source workflow automation tool that lets you connect APIs, services, and AI models without building a backend from scratch. It’s self-hostable, flexible, and gives you full control over your data, unlike tools like Zapier or Make, which are closed and often expensive.

In this session, we’ll build a simple but practical project live: an AI-powered morning briefing bot. It fetches the latest news from an API, summarizes it using a free LLM via OpenRouter, and sends a clean update to Telegram every morning. Once set up, it runs automatically.

Along with this, I’ll also briefly walk through other workflows and automations I’ve built using n8n, to give a broader idea of what’s possible beyond this one example.

While building this, I’ll explain how n8n actually works, how nodes connect, how data flows as JSON, and how to use expressions to pass data between steps. The idea is to help attendees understand the fundamentals so they can build their own workflows later.

This session is hands-on and beginner-friendly. By the end, attendees will have a working automation and a clear starting point to explore more use cases with n8n.

• Understand what n8n is and how it compares to tools like Zapier and Make

• Learn how to build a simple workflow using Schedule Trigger, HTTP Request, AI Agent, and Telegram nodes

• Understand how data moves between nodes and how to use expressions like {{ $json.field }}

• Learn how to connect an external AI model using OpenRouter

• Set up a Telegram bot and send formatted messages

• Run workflows automatically and explore options for local/self-hosted setup