Generate business research reports with Claude, web search and Google Drive

This workflow is a fully automated AI-powered business intelligence agent. It accepts a research topic or company name via webhook, autonomously collects data from multiple live sources (web search, news feeds, financial APIs), runs a multi-stage Claude AI analysis pipeline, and delivers a structured professional business report — all without human intervention.

What's the Goal? To eliminate the hours analysts spend manually gathering data, switching between tools, and writing reports. This workflow does it all in under 3 minutes: Collects live market and competitor data Pulls recent news and sentiment signals Runs deep AI analysis across all sources Generates a structured executive report with SWOT, risks, and opportunities Delivers the final report via email and saves to Google Drive

Why Does It Matter? Manual business research is slow, inconsistent, and expensive. This workflow: Saves 4-8 hours of analyst time per report Produces consistent, structured outputs every time Runs on a schedule or on-demand via API Scales to any number of topics or companies Integrates directly into your CRM, Slack, or email Generates billable deliverables for consulting agencies

How It Works Stage 1 — INTAKE Webhook receives a research request. Set node normalizes all inputs and stores credentials. IF node validates the request has a valid topic.

Stage 2 — DATA COLLECTION (parallel) Three HTTP Request nodes run simultaneously: Serper.dev fetches top 10 Google results for the topic NewsAPI pulls the latest 10 news articles from the past 7 days Alpha Vantage fetches financial/market data if a ticker is provided

Stage 3 — DATA PROCESSING Code node merges and cleans all collected data. Extracts headlines, snippets, URLs, publication dates, sentiment signals, and key figures into a structured context object ready for AI analysis.

Stage 4 — AI ANALYSIS (3-pass Claude pipeline) Pass 1 — Research Synthesis: Claude reads all raw data and extracts key facts, trends, and signals Pass 2 — Strategic Analysis: Claude performs SWOT analysis, identifies risks and opportunities Pass 3 — Report Generation: Claude writes the final structured executive report in Markdown

Stage 5 — OUTPUT & DELIVERY Report is saved to Google Drive as a document. Summary is posted to Slack. Full report is emailed via SendGrid. All metadata is logged to Google Sheets. Webhook returns JSON response.

Configuration Requirements ANTHROPIC_API_KEY — Claude AI (claude-sonnet-4-20250514) SERPER_API_KEY — Google Search results (serper.dev, free tier available) NEWSAPI_KEY — News articles (newsapi.org, free tier available) ALPHA_VANTAGE_KEY — Financial data (alphavantage.co, free tier available) SENDGRID_API_KEY — Email delivery SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL — Slack notifications GOOGLE_DRIVE_FOLDER_ID — Where to save reports GOOGLE_SHEET_ID — Report audit log

Setup Guide Step 1: Import this workflow into your n8n instance Step 2: Open the Set Credentials node and replace all placeholder values with your real API keys Step 3: Set your GOOGLE_SHEET_ID in the Log to Sheets node Step 4: Set your GOOGLE_DRIVE_FOLDER_ID in the Save to Drive node Step 5: Configure your Slack webhook URL in the Notify Slack node Step 6: Activate the workflow or trigger manually via POST

Sample Request POST /webhook/business-report { "topic": "OpenAI market position 2025", "company": "OpenAI", "ticker": "", "industry": "Artificial Intelligence", "reportType": "competitive_analysis", "recipientEmail": "analyst@yourcompany.com", "urgency": "standard" }

Report Types Supported competitive_analysis market_research industry_overview company_profile investment_brief