Daily news monitor for your topics in Slack and Sheets

Every morning at 8am, run a topic-watch sweep that turns up fresh articles on a configured list of topics, logs them to a Google Sheet, and posts a digest to Slack. The trigger is a cron schedule.

Inputs the workflow needs (collect as workflow variables): a list of topic strings (e.g. "OpenAI enterprise launches", "agentic search startups", "AI coding tools funding"), a Google Sheets spreadsheet ID and sheet name for the article log, and a Slack channel ID for the digest.

Step 1. For each topic string, call Exa Search restricted to results from the last 24 hours, with numResults around 10, and request highlights and a short summary in the contents block. Collect results across topics into a single merged list, keeping the topic that produced each result.

Step 2. Use Google Sheets Get Values on the URL column of the log sheet to read every URL we have already logged. Drop any merged result whose URL already appears in that list so we only keep net-new articles.

Step 3. Run an AI summarize step over the remaining articles that produces a one-line takeaway per article from its title, summary, and highlights.

Step 4. Use Google Sheets Append Values to log one row per new article with: date, topic, title, URL, source domain, and the one-line takeaway.

Step 5. Use Slack Send a Message to post a single digest to the configured channel. Group items by topic, render each topic as a bold header, and list up to the top 5 fresh items per topic as bullet links with their takeaways. Keep the digest under 1500 characters total and skip any topic that has zero new items so we never post empty sections. Do not use em dashes anywhere in the message.

Services to use: Exa for the search, Google Sheets for the dedup read and append log, Slack for the digest message. Workflow type is code with discrete deterministic nodes (search, sheet read, dedup, AI summarize, sheet append, slack post). No branching agent reasoning required.