From Hackweek to Production AI Workflow with n8n

At idealo, our AI enablement team ran company-wide n8n workshops for more than 100 employees, followed by an internal Hackweek focused on real automation ideas.One of those ideas started as a simple prototype and later became a production workflow used by our content team.The challenge was a research-heavy process covering thousands of product categories across multiple markets. Each analysis required significant manual effort.We built a self-service n8n workflow with a simple form trigger that any content employee can use.They submit a request through the form, n8n retrieves the relevant structured data, an AI Agent creates a standardized analysis, and the result is automatically published into the team's existing knowledge-management environment.The core pattern is simple:**Form request → Retrieve data → AI analyzes → Publish**Moving from prototype to production taught us that AI quality depends on much more than prompts or model choice.The quality and structure of the underlying data had a major impact on the final output.We also benchmarked multiple LLMs on the same real-world task and found that smaller models could deliver comparable results at a fraction of the cost.The talk will share what we learned about turning an n8n prototype into a reliable self-service production tool, including validation, safeguards, error handling, observability, and usability for non-technical teams.