Daily worldwide news briefing for HubSpot accounts in Slack

Build me an agent-based workflow that runs every weekday at 7:30am in my local time zone and gives my sales team a morning briefing on material news at our HubSpot accounts. The point is that reps walk into meetings already knowing if a customer announced layoffs, got acquired, hit a regulatory issue, or showed up in negative coverage.

Trigger: cron, every weekday at 7:30am. Cron is correct here because neither GDELT nor HubSpot's company list is in the poll trigger catalog for new-company events.

Step 1, pull the watchlist from HubSpot. Use HubSpot List Companies and filter to our active customers and target prospects. Default to companies whose lifecyclestage is customer or opportunity, but make the filter easy to change to a target-account boolean property or a specific pipeline stage. Include the company name, domain, hubspot id, and the owner.

Step 2, for each company in the watchlist, run two GDELT calls in parallel:

a) GDELT Search News Articles (DOC 2.0) over the last 24 hours. Build the query as ("<company name>" OR domain:<company domain>) and include sourcelang and sourcecountry operators so non-English worldwide coverage is captured. Cap MAXRECORDS sensibly and request format=json. Pull title, url, source domain, language, source country, seendate, and snippet.

b) GDELT Article Tone Timeline (DOC 2.0) over the last 14 days for the same query. Use this to detect a sudden negative tone shift in the last 24 hours versus the prior two-week baseline.

Step 3, an agent ranks what actually matters for a sales conversation. Promote regulatory action, leadership change, mergers and acquisitions, layoffs, lawsuits, outages, security incidents, and earnings surprises. Demote routine product PR, sponsored content, and pure marketing announcements. Treat a sharp negative tone shift on the 14-day timeline as a strong signal even if no single article looks dramatic. Skip companies with zero notable news.

Step 4, post one threaded Slack digest using Slack Send a Message in #account-news (make the channel a parameter). Top message is a one-line summary with the date and the count of accounts flagged. Then one threaded reply per flagged account, grouped by account, with the company name, a two-line plain-English context summary the agent wrote, the tone trend if it shifted, and the source link. Keep it skimmable. Do not post anything for accounts with no material news.

Step 5, for each flagged account, also use HubSpot Create Note to write a structured note on the company record. Note body should be the same two-line context summary plus the source link, with a clear prefix like "News brief, YYYY-MM-DD" so it is easy to scan on the timeline. Associate the note to the company id.

Important: GDELT is a free public API with no auth, so no credential is needed for it. HubSpot and Slack both need connected accounts. Be polite to GDELT, keep requests serial per company and back off on 429s.

Operations to use: hubspot List Companies, gdelt Search News Articles (DOC 2.0), gdelt Article Tone Timeline (DOC 2.0), slack Send a Message, hubspot Create Note.

Additional information

What does this prompt do?

Pulls your active customers and target prospects from HubSpot every weekday morning so the briefing matches your real account list.
Scans worldwide news from the last 24 hours across 65+ languages, so non-English coverage of multinational accounts is not missed.
Watches the two-week tone trend on each account and flags sudden negative shifts that often precede public news cycles.
Posts one threaded Slack digest grouped by account, with two lines of context and a source link, and skips accounts with nothing material.
Drops a structured note on each affected company in HubSpot so the account executive sees it right on the record.

What do I need to use this?

A HubSpot login with access to your companies and a way to mark which ones belong on the watchlist (a pipeline stage, a target-account property, or a list).
A Slack workspace and a channel for the morning digest, such as #account-news.
A working time zone for the 7:30am send so reps get it before their first meetings.
Nothing to set up for the news source. GDELT is free and public.

How can I customize it?

Change the send time, the days it runs, or the Slack channel it posts to.
Adjust which HubSpot companies count as the watchlist (pipeline stage, owner, target-account flag, or a saved list).
Tighten or widen what counts as material. The default flags regulatory action, leadership change, mergers and acquisitions, layoffs, lawsuits, and outages, and ignores routine product PR.
Restrict or expand the languages and source countries covered, for example focusing on EMEA or APAC coverage only.
Turn off the HubSpot note write-back if you only want the Slack digest, or turn off Slack if you only want the CRM notes.

Frequently asked questions

Will this surface news in languages other than English?

Yes. That is the main reason to use this brief. It scans worldwide coverage in 65+ languages and pulls in non-English reporting on your multinational accounts that an English-only alert would miss.

How does it decide what is worth flagging?

An agent ranks each story by materiality. Regulatory action, leadership change, mergers and acquisitions, layoffs, lawsuits, outages, and security incidents make the cut. Product launches and routine PR are filtered out so reps only see what would actually change a sales conversation.

What if a company has no news that day?

Nothing is posted for that company. The digest only includes accounts with at least one material story, so the Slack channel stays signal-heavy.

How does the watchlist get built from HubSpot?

You pick the rule. Most teams use a pipeline stage like Customer or Active Opportunity, a target-account property, or an owner filter. The workflow reads that filter and only briefs on those companies.

Can I change the Slack channel or the time it runs?

Yes. Both are simple knobs. Tell the workflow author the channel name and the time of day, and it will update the schedule.

Does it write back to HubSpot?

By default it creates a structured note on each affected company so the account executive sees the briefing on the record. You can turn the note write-back off if you only want the Slack digest.