I recently ran a live workshop for the NAS Academy community, and this is the exact Make scenario I built with the students, step by step. Several of them had never touched an automation platform before, and by the end they each had a working AI assistant running in their own account.
The goal was simple. Most mornings start the same messy way: open your inbox, check your calendar, scan your task list, glance at the weather, skim the news, and only then figure out what your day actually looks like. So we built one automation that gathers all of that and hands you a single, clean morning brief before you even open your laptop.
The best part for a beginner audience: it needs no code and no separate AI API keys, because it runs on Make’s built-in AI.
Here is exactly what it does, how each part works, and the shared blueprint at the end so you can clone it.
What the AI Morning Brief Automation Does
Every weekday morning this Make scenario automatically:
Pulls today’s meetings from Google Calendar
Collects unread emails from Gmail for the current day
Reads open tasks from Google Tasks
Gets the daily weather forecast for your city
Fetches the latest business news from an RSS feed
Combines everything into a single JSON payload
Uses AI to write a concise executive brief
Delivers the same brief to both email and Slack
The output is one tidy briefing: a greeting, the weather, your meetings in order, outstanding tasks, the emails that genuinely need attention, a few relevant headlines, your top priorities, and any blockers to watch for.
How the Make Scenario Is Built
This build is a great learning project because it demonstrates a pattern you will reuse in almost every serious automation: collect, aggregate, combine, generate, deliver.
1. Collect each data source
- Google Calendar › Search Events for today’s meetings, from now until end of day
- Gmail › Search emails filtered to unread messages in today’s inbox
- Google Tasks › List Tasks for open, not completed tasks
- Weather › Get Daily Forecast by city name for one day
- RSS › Retrieve feed items from a business news feed, top five items
2. Aggregate the results
Each source (except weather) runs through a Basic Aggregator, which turns a long list of separate bundles into one clean array. This is the step most beginners find tricky, so it is worth slowing down and explaining clearly.
3. Build one payload
A Create JSON module combines all five sources, meetings, emails, tasks, weather, and news, together with the date and timezone, into one structured object. This is the key design choice. Instead of mapping five separate fields into the prompt, the AI receives a single payload and can reason across the whole day at once.
4. Generate the brief with AI
The built-in AI module (Run an Agent) takes a system prompt that defines the Executive Assistant role and the exact output format, plus the JSON payload as its input. I kept the reasoning effort on Low, which is more than enough for a summarization task and keeps every run fast and inexpensive.
5. Deliver everywhere
A Router splits the AI response into two routes:
- Slack, which posts the brief to a channel with markdown formatting
- Email, which sends it as a clean HTML message
Same brief, delivered to wherever you look first thing in the morning.
The System Prompt That Makes It Work
The prompt does most of the heavy lifting. Here is the essence of what I used:
You are an AI Executive Assistant. Create a concise, actionable morning briefing from the user’s calendar, tasks, unread emails, weather, and news. Structure it with a greeting, the weather and any impact on travel or meetings, meetings in chronological order, outstanding tasks with deadlines, important unread emails while ignoring newsletters and promotions unless relevant, two or three relevant news headlines, three to five ranked priorities, and any blockers. Keep it under 500 words, use clear headings, light emojis, and bullet points. The output should be ready to send to email or Slack with no editing.
A specific, well structured prompt is what turns a pile of raw data into something you actually want to read.
Why This Is a Great First AI Automation
For the workshop this project hit a real sweet spot, and it works just as well as a personal build:
- Immediately useful, because everyone has a chaotic morning inbox
- Teaches the core Make skills, including connections, multiple data sources, aggregators, data mapping, JSON, AI, and routers, all in one scenario
- No API key friction, since Make’s built-in AI lets you pick a model and go without signing up for anything extra
- Easy to extend, so you can swap the news feed for your own industry, add a CRM, add Notion, or change the delivery channel
Watching a full room get their first AI written brief land in their own inbox was the highlight of the session.
Clone the Blueprint
Want to build your own AI morning brief? Here is the shared scenario. Clone it, connect your own accounts, and adjust it to fit your day:
AI Executive Assistant That Briefs You Every Morning
After cloning, set these to make it yours:
- Your Google connections for Calendar, Gmail, and Tasks
- Your Slack channel
- Your city in the Weather module
- A news RSS feed you like, since I used a general business feed
- Your preferred model in the built-in AI module
If you build on it or improve it, reply and share what you made. Happy automating.