Query Slack Channel History with Natural Language using OpenAI

Chat with a Slack channel using AI. This workflow fetches the channel’s message history and lets you ask natural-language questions (“what were the decisions?”, “who’s blocked?”, “summarize yesterday”). The assistant only answers from the channel’s actual messages—no guessing.

⚙️ Setup Instructions

1️⃣ Set Up OpenAI Connection

1. Go to OpenAI Platform
2. Navigate to OpenAI Billing
3. Add funds to your billing account
4. Copy your API key into the OpenAI credentials in n8n

2️⃣ Connect Slack API

1. Create an app → <https://api.slack.com/apps&gt;
2. OAuth & Permissions → add scopes you need to read channel history (typical:
   channels:history, groups:history, im:history, mpim:history, plus channels:read, groups:read, users:read. Add chat:write if you want the bot to reply in Slack.)
3. Install the app to your workspace → copy the Bot User OAuth Token
4. In n8n → Credentials → New → Slack OAuth2 API → paste token and save
5. In the Slack History node, select your Slack credential and the Channel ID to read

🗣️ Example Questions You Can Ask

• “Give me a 5-bullet summary of the last 24 hours.”
• “What action items were assigned, and to whom?”
• “List open questions that haven’t been answered yet.”
• “Who was mentioned most this week?”
• “Summarize decisions from the last sprint planning.”
• “Show messages with the word ‘blocker’ from the past 2 days.”
• “What files/links were shared today?”

📬 Contact

Need help customizing this or adding auto-replies back into Slack?

• 📧 [email protected]
• 🔗 Robert Breen
• 🌐 ynteractive.com