Daily pre-meeting news brief in Slack from your Google Calendar

Build me an agent workflow that gives me a morning briefing on the outside companies I'm meeting with today, so I never walk into a call cold.

Trigger: a cron schedule that fires every weekday (Monday through Friday) at 7:00am in my local timezone.

Step 1. Use Google Calendar's List Events on my primary calendar to pull every event scheduled for today (timeMin = start of today in my timezone, timeMax = end of today, singleEvents = true, orderBy = startTime). Skip events I've declined, all-day events, and events with no other attendees.

Step 2. For each remaining event, look at the attendee emails and the meeting title to identify the outside company. Ignore my own company's domain and common free-email providers like gmail.com, outlook.com, yahoo.com, icloud.com, hotmail.com. If multiple attendees share an external domain, that's the company. If the title clearly names a company (for example 'Acme x MyCo sync'), use that as a fallback. Collapse everything into a unique list of companies for the day. Skip any meeting where the only attendees are internal.

Step 3. For each unique company, call Real-Time News Data's Search News with the company name as the query, time_published set to 7d (last seven days), country = us, language = en, and a small limit like 10. Then judge each returned article and keep only the ones that are materially about that company, not articles where the company is mentioned in passing. Pick the top 1 to 3 most relevant articles per company.

Step 4. Compose a single briefing message. Group it by company. For each company, write a short header with the company name and the meeting time, then a one-paragraph plain-English summary of what's been happening (synthesizing the chosen articles, not just quoting them), then a bulleted list of the source article titles with their links. If a company has no relevant news from the last seven days, still include the company in the briefing with the text 'no fresh news in the last 7 days' instead of skipping it silently. If there are no external meetings today at all, send a short note saying the day looks internal-only.

Step 5. Deliver the briefing as a single Slack message to my own DM. Use Slack's Open a Conversation with my own user id to resolve the DM channel, then Send a Message with the full briefing as one message (use Slack mrkdwn formatting: *bold* for the company headers, <url|title> for the article links). Do not send one message per company. The whole thing should land as a single digest I can scan in one place before my first call.

Tone: practical and skimmable. No filler. Treat this like a sales rep's morning prep doc.

Additional information

What does this prompt do?

Reads today's meetings from your Google Calendar each weekday morning.
Identifies the outside companies you're meeting with by looking at attendee email domains and meeting titles.
Pulls the last seven days of news on each company and keeps only stories that are actually about them, not passing mentions.
Delivers one combined briefing to your Slack DM with a short summary and source link for each company, and a clear note when there's nothing fresh to report.

What do I need to use this?

A Google account with the calendar you use for meetings.
A Slack workspace you can sign into and receive DMs in.
A Real-Time News Data account for the news lookups (the free plan is enough to start).

How can I customize it?

Change the delivery time or send it on weekends too.
Switch the destination from your DM to a specific Slack channel like #sales-prep.
Tighten or loosen the news window, the number of stories per company, or the rule for which attendees count as external.

Frequently asked questions

Does it cover internal meetings too?

No. The agent skips meetings that only include people from your own company, so you only get briefs for the calls that actually need prep.

What happens if there's no recent news about a company?

The company still shows up in your briefing with a short 'no fresh news' note. You won't be left guessing whether the agent ran or just didn't find anything.

Can I get this in a Slack channel instead of a DM?

Yes. When you set it up you can point the briefing at any channel or group DM your team uses for morning prep.

Will it message me on holidays or days with no meetings?

If there are no external meetings on the calendar, the agent sends a short note that the day is clear instead of a full briefing.

How does it decide which company a meeting is about?

It looks at attendee email domains and the meeting title, ignores your own company and common free email providers, and groups the rest into the unique companies you're meeting with that day.