AI Grant Discovery & Qualification Agent using n8n and OpenAI

Unlock Automated Grant Sourcing & Pre-Qualification with this AI Agent

Stop spending hours manually sifting through grant databases. This AI Agent acts as your dedicated grant scout, working 24/7 to find, analyze, and qualify opportunities from grants.gov that match your AI-focused business. It then neatly organizes findings in Airtable and delivers a daily digest to your team.

This AI Agent's core abilities include:

• Automated Grant Discovery: Regularly scans grants.gov for new AI-related opportunities based on your keywords (default is "ai").
• Intelligent Summarization: Leverages OpenAI's language models to extract key information from grant synopses, providing concise summaries (goal, duration, success criteria, good-to-know points).
• AI-Powered Eligibility Assessment: Analyzes grant eligibility criteria against your company's profile (which you'll provide) to determine potential matches.
• Centralized Tracking: Saves all discovered and analyzed grants to an Airtable base for easy management and review.
• Automated Daily Briefings: Generates and sends an HTML email newsletter with newly found, eligible grants to your specified subscribers.

Key Features & Benefits

• Significant Time Savings: Automates the tedious process of grant searching and initial review.
• Focused Efforts: AI-driven qualification helps you concentrate on grants with the highest potential for success.
• Never Miss an Opportunity: Scheduled daily checks ensure you're always up-to-date with the latest listings.
• Improved Team Collaboration: Centralized Airtable tracker and email digests keep everyone informed.
• Customizable Eligibility: Tailor the AI's eligibility check by providing your specific company details and focus areas.
• Duplicate Prevention: Smartly filters out grants already processed in previous runs.
• Extensible: Easily adapt to other lead sources or notification channels within n8n.

• An n8n instance (Cloud or self-hosted).
• OpenAI API Key with access to a suitable model (e.g., gpt-3.5-turbo or gpt-4).
• Airtable account and a Personal Access Token. You'll need to set up (or copy) an Airtable base similar to the example structure (see setup).
• Gmail account with OAuth2 credentials configured in n8n for sending email notifications.

1. Download the n8n workflow JSON file.
2. Import the workflow into your n8n instance.
3. Configure OpenAI Nodes:
   • Update the 'OpenAI Chat Model' and 'OpenAI Chat Model1' nodes with your OpenAI API Key.
   • Crucially: In the 'Eligibility Factors' node, edit the systemPromptTemplate parameter. Replace the placeholder company description with your own company's details, services, and focus areas. The more accurate this is, the better the AI's eligibility assessment.
4. Configure Airtable Nodes:
   • You can either copy the sample Airtable base (link often found in workflow's sticky notes or original template source) or adapt the nodes to your existing base.
   • Update the 'Save to Tracker', 'Get New Eligible Grants Today', and 'Get Subscribers' Airtable nodes with your Airtable Personal Access Token, Base ID, and Table Names/IDs.
5. Configure Grant Source (Optional):
   • The 'AI Grants since Yesterday' HTTP Request node is pre-configured to search for "ai" keyword on grants.gov. Modify the jsonBody if you want to change keywords, date ranges, or other search parameters.
6. Configure Email Notifications:
   • Update the 'Send Subscriber Email' Gmail node with your Gmail credentials.
   • Ensure your 'Get Subscribers' Airtable node points to a table containing subscriber emails.
7. Adjust Schedules (Optional):
   • Modify the 'Everyday @ 8.30am' (grant fetching) and 'Everyday @ 9am' (email sending) Schedule Trigger nodes if you prefer different timings.
8. Activate the workflow. Monitor the first few runs to ensure data flows correctly and AI outputs meet your expectations.