PlainAgent / Templates / Slack channel digest agent
Operations templateSlack channel digest agent
A Slack channel digest agent reads one busy channel once a day and posts a short summary: what was decided, what still needs an answer and who said they'd do what. People who missed the day catch up in a minute instead of scrolling.
Turn one day of messages in a Slack channel into a digest of decisions, open questions and action items.
A schedule: every weekday morning, covering the weekend on Mondays.
Never automatically. The digest is a pointer back to the channel; anyone who needs the detail reads the original messages.
- The channel's top-level messages since the last digest, with time and author
- Which messages started a thread, and how many replies it has
- Read the channel history (a Slack app you create, added to the channel)
- Post one message to a digest channel
- Only use what is in the messages: no guessed owners or due dates.
- Leave out empty sections, and say nothing about how an unseen thread ended.
- Post a private channel's digest only where the same people can read it.
How to build it
- Pick one channel where decisions get buried, and a place for the digest: the same channel, or a separate one like #team-digest.
- Create your own Slack app in your workspace with read access to channel history and permission to post, and invite it to both channels.
- Schedule it for each weekday morning. On Mondays, read back 72 hours so Friday afternoon and the weekend are included.
- Before the AI step, drop join messages, bot posts and empty lines, and sort the rest oldest first.
- Paste the system prompt below into the AI step, with the messages as the input. Give it a high enough output limit for about 200 words.
- Run it by hand for a week and compare each digest with the channel before people rely on it.
System prompt
Replace the parts in {BRACES}. Works in most builders (Custom GPTs, Claude Projects, Copilot Studio, n8n/Zapier/Make AI steps).
You write a short daily digest of the Slack channel {CHANNEL NAME} for people who missed the day. You get the top-level messages from the period, oldest first, one per line as [time] person: text.
Write the digest with these sections, and leave out any section that would be empty:
Decided: decisions that were made, one bullet each
Needs an answer: questions nobody has answered yet
Action items: who will do what, with a due date only if one was stated
FYI: anything else worth knowing, at most 3 bullets
Rules:
- Use only what is in the messages. Don't guess owners, dates or outcomes.
- Refer to people exactly as they appear in the messages.
- A line marked [thread: N replies not shown] started a thread you can't see, so don't say how it ended.
- Keep it under {WORD LIMIT, e.g. 200} words. No greeting and no sign-off.
Test before you switch it on
- Run it on a day where you know what was decided, and check every decision is there and nothing is invented.
- Run it on a quiet day with no messages: it should post nothing, not an empty digest.
- Run it on a Monday and check that Friday afternoon's messages are covered.
- Include a question that was answered inside a thread, and check the digest doesn't claim an answer it can't see.
- Check who gets a notification: names in the digest can ping people (see below).
What 127 public Slack digest templates show
In our study of 13,574 public n8n templates (snapshot 2026-10-20), 127 templates use a Slack node and have "summary", "digest" or "recap" in their name. Not all of them summarize a Slack channel (some post a digest of another app into Slack), so read this as a rough picture:
| The template… | Templates | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Runs on a schedule | 91 | 71.7% |
| Uses an AI model | 91 | 71.7% |
| Uses an AI agent | 44 | 34.6% |
| Uses OpenAI | 51 | 40.2% |
| Uses Google Gemini | 26 | 20.5% |
| Uses Anthropic's Claude | 8 | 6.3% |
| Has a Code node | 96 | 75.6% |
| Has an Error Trigger | 7 | 5.5% |
A digest is a scheduled job, and most builders treat it that way: about 7 in 10 run on a schedule. Three in four have a Code node, usually to clean and join the messages before the AI step, which is the same step 4 above. Only 7 of 127 (5.5%) have an Error Trigger, so if Slack rejects a request, most of these would just stop posting without telling anyone. Pick a builder that can alert you when a run fails.
Three Slack rules that decide how you build it
- Use your own Slack app. Since May 29, 2025, apps that are distributed commercially but aren't in the Slack Marketplace can call
conversations.historyonly once a minute, for 15 messages a time. Apps a workspace builds for itself keep 50+ calls a minute and up to 1,000 messages (Slack changelog). A third-party digest app that isn't in the Marketplace may not be able to read a busy channel in one go. - Threads are a separate read. Channel history returns the messages in the channel itself. Replies inside a thread need
conversations.replies, one call per thread (Slack docs). If your team decides things in threads, plan for those extra calls, or have the digest point to the threads. - Mentions ping people. A user mention in an app's message notifies that person only if they are already in the channel where it is posted (Slack docs). Post the digest in the same channel and everyone named gets a ping each morning; post it to a separate digest channel to keep it quiet.
Totals from the public n8n template library (snapshot 2026-10-20), computed with the same definitions as the study. Group: templates with a Slack node whose name has "summary", "digest" or "recap". A template can contain several nodes, so shares overlap. No individual templates are published.
New to this? Read how to build an AI agent, or generate your own spec with the agent planner. For a digest built from your tools' numbers rather than chat, see the weekly report agent.