How do you automate routine work with n8n and AI agents?

Which work is worth automating

Requests are done on paper. To take time off, an employee fills in a request template, gets their manager to sign it and sends a scan to HR. If the manager is on a business trip, getting the signature can take several days.

Data gets copied by hand. A sales rep sees a lead in the CRM and forwards it to the sales chat. An accountant copies an invoice from email into a spreadsheet. If the rep is in a meeting, the lead sits in the CRM until evening, and a phone number or an amount can get mistyped when copying.

One person does all the reminding. Before the stand-up, a manager checks overdue tasks and messages each assignee. When the manager is on vacation, nobody gets reminded.

The same questions keep coming back. Employees ask where the business travel policy is and how to report sick leave. HR answers these questions every week and gets pulled away from their own work every time.

Customer requests arrive without a topic or priority. Support emails all land in one chat. The person on duty reads each email in full to figure out whether it's urgent.

Work worth automating is work people do by hand, following the same steps, at least once a week.

What n8n is

n8n is an automation builder. A chain of actions in it is called a workflow, and the blocks you build it from are called nodes. No programming is needed.

Every workflow starts with a trigger, the event that launches it: a new message, a submitted form, a CRM record or a schedule. Action and logic nodes come next: check a field, pick a route, send a message, create a task. The n8n catalog has more than a thousand nodes for spreadsheets, CRMs, trackers and databases. If a service isn't there, the HTTP Request node can reach any service with an API.

You can run n8n on your own server for free, with no limit on the number of workflows. Customer data then stays on your company's servers. The cloud version is a subscription, but you don't need a server of your own. We covered installation, pricing and how n8n compares to Zapier and Make in the article "n8n: what it is and how it works".

Where a workflow needs an AI agent

Regular nodes move data as is: the "Company" field from a form goes into the "Company" field of a message. That doesn't work for text people wrote in their own words. A node with a language model reads a customer's email and sums it up in one line, picks out the topic and priority, pulls a contract number out of the text or drafts a reply. In the example above, the AI agent picked the time off dates and the name of the colleague covering out of the employee's message.

An AI agent in n8n is a node that takes a task and decides for itself which tools to use to complete it. Other nodes can be its tools, such as Pachca message search. With that tool, the agent finds a similar request in the chat history and what the reply to it was. AI nodes need an API key from a language model provider, which you add in the n8n settings.

A model can make mistakes, so start with tasks where a mistake shows right away: a short summary of a request, the topic of an email, a draft reply or request that a person checks before sending.

What you can automate

We walked through some of these processes step by step in separate use cases.

Employee requests. An employee presses a bot button and fills in a form right in Pachca. The request arrives in the department's chat with an "Approve" or "Take it" button, and the bot tells the employee what was decided. That's how people request time off, a guest pass, IT help, office repairs, a new hire and an invoice payment.

HR paperwork. HR posts an order with an "Acknowledged" button, and the bot reminds everyone who hasn't pressed it and collects the acknowledgement sheet. When someone leaves, the bot sends departments an offboarding checklist, and each department closes its item with a button. When a new employee starts, the bot posts a list of access rights the admins need to grant.

Finance. An employee sends the bot a photo of a receipt, and at the end of the month the bot puts the receipts together into an expense report. An invoice request from the CRM arrives in a chat, and after a button press the bot issues the invoice and tracks the payment. For work with самозанятые and ИП, the bot assembles documents from a template.

Notifications from other systems. Leads from the website and the CRM arrive in the sales chat, and a rep takes a lead with a button. Customer reviews from review sites arrive in a chat, and the reply is agreed on in a thread. A thread is a discussion branch under a specific message. Monitoring alerts arrive in the on-call chat, and the outage is worked out in the thread under the alert. Pachca has ready-made integrations for GitLab and Grafana, so they don't need n8n. Services with outgoing webhooks, such as Bitrix24, amoCRM or Jira, can also be connected without n8n, through an incoming webhook. n8n comes in handy when an event needs processing: filtering, adding data from another system or passing it to an AI agent.

Scheduled reminders. Every morning the bot posts a list of overdue tasks and their assignees in the team chat. Before the stand-up, the bot collects statuses from employees through a form and posts a summary, so the call covers only what's blocking work.

An AI agent in the chat. An employee mentions the bot in a chat, and the AI agent replies in the thread based on the company knowledge base. We showed how to build such an agent in the use case "How do you build an AI agent without code?". The agent also checks purchase requests and brings a budget summary. After an outage, it puts together an incident review from the discussion in the alert thread.

How to set it up in Pachca

A bot. The workflow posts to Pachca as a bot. To create one, open the Integrations menu, choose Bots and click Create bot. Add the bot to the chats it will post in. You'll need the bot token from the API tab to connect it to n8n.

The Pachca node in n8n. Pachca has an official node in the n8n catalog, verified by the n8n team. In the cloud version it's available right away; on your own server you install it as an extension. Find Pachca in the nodes panel and add the bot token to Credentials, the n8n key store. The node sends and updates messages, creates threads and tasks, and searches messages. The Pachca Trigger starts a workflow when a new message appears in a chat, an employee presses a bot button or submits a form, or a member is added to a chat.

Buttons and forms. A bot can send a message with buttons and open a form with fields when a button is pressed. An employee fills in the form in Pachca, and the data goes straight into the workflow. The request comes in the same format every time, so nobody has to clarify it in the chat. We walked through a step-by-step example in the article "Pachca × n8n automation: vacation requests".

Discussion in a thread. The bot replies in the thread under a request or an alert. That way the discussion stays under the message it started from.

Ready-made workflows. The developer portal has seven workflows with walkthroughs: a welcome message for new employees, forwarding messages between chats, overdue tasks, approval with buttons, monitoring, a vacation request and an AI assistant. Import the file into n8n, replace the Credentials with your own and run it.

If n8n isn't a fit. You can set up notifications from more than 250 services through Albato, also without code. If the Pachca node lacks an operation you need, a developer can call the API method from n8n with the HTTP Request node.

Where to start

Pick one process the team does by hand every week, such as time off requests. The developer portal has a ready-made workflow for it: import it and run it for one department. Assign an owner for n8n. If n8n runs on your own server, the owner updates it and watches for errors in the executions log.