I built a free n8n workflow that turns messy meeting notes into action items

Meetings end, notes get lost, and action items live in someone's head until they don't.

I got tired of re-reading raw transcripts to work out who owed what, so I automated it with n8n + GPT-4o-mini. It is free, it is on GitHub, and you can import it in about a minute.

What it does

You paste a transcript (or a messy bullet list of what was said) and the workflow returns four things:

1. Summary - 2-3 sentences on what the meeting was about and where it landed.
2. Decisions - only the decisions that were actually made.
3. Action items - a table with Action | Owner | Due.
4. Follow-up email - a short ready-to-send draft in the tone you chose.

The workflow (4 nodes)

• Manual Trigger - run it when a meeting ends.
• Set Meeting Notes and Attendees - the inputs: meeting_title, attendees, tone, raw_notes.
• Summarize Meeting with OpenAI - one GPT-4o-mini call with a strict prompt.
• Set Meeting Summary - stores the model output in a single meeting_summary field.

No database. No extra credentials beyond your OpenAI key. One LLM call per run.

The one prompt rule that matters

The trick is not "summarize this". It is telling the model exactly which sections to return and constraining it to the source:

Only use information present in the notes. If something is unknown, write "not stated" instead of guessing.

Without that line, models happily invent owners and due dates. With it, you get a table you can trust. I also ask for an Action | Owner | Due table so the output is usable in a standup, not just a nice paragraph.

Try it

• Import the JSON from GitHub (MIT): https://github.com/zhp910318/n8n-ai-automation-lab/tree/main/meeting-notes-to-action-items
• Set your fields, run it, copy the debrief.

If you want the production version (scheduled, multi-source, delivered to Slack or Notion), the paid templates in my store do the end-to-end job: https://payhip.com/haopengailab

Free stays free. Fork it, change the prompt, ship it.

If you build something with it, tell me what you would add first: a Notion sync, a Slack recap, or a CRM note.