If you're learning AI, building a chatbot is the obvious first project. Automation is the less obvious one, and it's often what employers actually need: AI steps inside a workflow that saves someone time. n8n is a good place to start because you can self-host it free and see every step.
Here are three projects we give students, in order of difficulty.
1. Form to spreadsheet to email
Trigger: a form submission (n8n's Form Trigger, or a Google Form).
Steps: append the row to Google Sheets, then send a confirmation email.
What you learn: triggers, credentials, mapping fields between nodes, testing with sample data.
2. Inbox sorter with an AI step
Trigger: new email in a test Gmail account.
Steps: send the subject and body to an LLM node with a short prompt ("Classify as: enquiry, invoice, spam, other. Reply with one word."), then route with a Switch node to different labels or a Slack/Telegram message.
What you learn: prompting for structured output, handling unexpected answers (add a default branch), not sending more data to the model than needed.
3. Weekly summary with human approval
Trigger: a schedule, every Monday.
Steps: pull last week's rows from a sheet, ask the model to write a five-line summary, send it to yourself for approval, and only then post it to a channel.
What you learn: scheduled workflows, aggregating data, and the most important habit in AI automation: a person approves anything that goes out.
Tips
- Use test accounts, never your personal inbox.
- Keep API keys in n8n credentials, not in node fields.
- Export each workflow as JSON and commit it to a GitHub repo with a README and a screenshot. That's your portfolio.
We teach these at Dzimark Training in Mohali as part of our AI course in Chandigarh and Mohali.
