Introduction to Workflow Automation with n8n

Why Workflow Automation?

Every team has repetitive tasks that drain time and attention — copying data between tools, routing messages to the right person, formatting spreadsheet exports, or triaging incoming requests. Workflow automation eliminates this manual work by connecting your tools and letting triggers, logic, and data transformations handle the rest. n8n is the open-source platform that makes this accessible to everyone: a visual, drag-and-drop canvas where you build automations without writing a single line of code. In this course, you'll go from zero to building complete, intelligent workflows — including ones powered by AI.

Get Hands-On with the n8n Canvas

You'll start by learning what makes n8n unique among automation tools and how its node-based architecture works. Then you'll get hands-on immediately: importing and executing your first workflow, adding triggers to kick off automations, and building workflows from scratch. You'll master Form Triggers to collect user input, Manual Triggers for on-demand execution, and Edit Fields nodes to create, reshape, and filter data. By the end of the first chapter, you'll be building workflows that capture form submissions, call live APIs for real-time exchange rates, and add timestamps — all through n8n's visual interface.

Add Logic and Transform Data

Real-world automations need decision-making. In the second chapter, you'll add conditional logic using If nodes for binary decisions and Switch nodes for multi-way routing. You'll write expressions to access dynamic data from previous nodes, standardize messy text with string methods like toLowerCase(), and flatten nested JSON structures into clean, usable fields. The chapter culminates with the Merge node — combining data from multiple sources by matching on shared fields, a fundamental data integration skill you'll use in every serious automation.

Supercharge Workflows with AI

The final chapter brings large language models into your automations. You'll connect OpenAI-powered Agent nodes to summarize customer feedback, classify text into categories like positive, negative, or neutral, and route the results through conditional branches. You'll learn to craft effective prompts, reference dynamic data inside them, and chain multiple AI steps together. The course ends with a capstone project: a complete onboarding pipeline that collects form data, prepares it for classification, determines a customer's tier using an LLM, routes to the appropriate branch, and drafts a personalized welcome message — all without writing code.