Overview

An n8n automation that reads every incoming email to a supply chain business using AI, identifies which department it belongs to, and instantly routes it to the right Slack channel with automatic acknowledgement sent back to the sender for customer-facing emails.

Stack: n8n · OpenAI · Gmail · Slack

Status: ✅ Built & Tested

🧩 The Problem

Supply chain businesses deal with a high volume of mixed emails daily, including client delivery complaints, supplier updates, procurement enquiries, job applications, partnership requests, and more. These all land in one inbox, and someone has to manually read, decide, and forward each one to the right team.

This creates real operational problems:

• Emails meant for customer service (e.g., delayed shipment complaints) sit unread for hours, damaging client relationships
• Sales enquiries reach the wrong person and lose momentum
• HR emails like job applications get buried in an operations inbox
• No team knows what's coming in until someone manually checks and forwards it
• Critical supply chain issues get delayed because the right person wasn't notified fast enough

✅ The Solution: How It Works

1. Gmail Trigger: Inbox Monitoring

The workflow watches the business inbox continuously. The moment a new email arrives from a client, supplier, applicant, or partner, it is picked up and sent to the AI for reading.

Solves: Emails sitting unread in a shared inbox with no clear owner.

2. OpenAI: AI Email Classification