[Apex Workshop] Join Relay.app Founder Jacob Bank on April.18th!

Plus a in person gathering on April.11 : D

Apr 07, 2025

💡 Editor’s Note: Last week when chatting with community members, I came to realize that we had a common need - summarize AI industry news and get a daily digest. Sounds like a daunting project - until I came to realize the AI-powered workflows can solve this nicely! I’ll detail the entire flow in the builders corner for your to build your own workflow!

💡 Share & Try Manus.im! Last week we had a great chat Manus founder Tao and got access to a few activation codes. To make sure everyone can try it out, we are providing a Community Manus Account for you to try out manus!
From now through April.18, share this post, comment your AI experience below, and we draft 3 lucky winners for access to the Community Account!

Join us to learn about AI Workflow (relay.app) April.18!

Sign up today at https://lu.ma/u9oblvlk !

Cover Image for [PMAI][ApexLab Workshop] Build an AI agent with Jacob Bank, Founder of Relay.app

On April 18, Jacob Bank, founder of relay.app, ex-Google, serial entrepreneur , will share how to create powerful Automation workflows leveraging AI agents. If you have heard about workflow tools like Zapier, Make, n8n etc. This is the new, up-n-coming tool that provides solid experience!

Join AI Founders/Aspiring Founders social on April.11!

Sign up today at https://lu.ma/dfcgpy9t !

Cover Image for [PMAI][IRL] AI Founders Mixer: Connect & Chat at Market 57!

Looking to connect with fellow AI founders, exchange ideas, or just enjoy conversations about the latest in AI over drinks? Come hang out with us at Market 57 for an evening of casual networking and authentic discussions!

@Market 57 Next to Chelsea Market, we will have a light-hearted social gathering at the pier! **food not included**

Builder’s Corner - Get Creative With Workflows

Acharya et al (2025) defined Agentic AI as “refers to autonomous systems designed to pursue complex goals with minimal human intervention”. This is pretty much all the imagination we have about Agentic AI - a tool that just does the job for us, handsoff. However, such is not the case just yet for all of the tools out there.

Agentic AI and AI Agents covers a wide range of products with different levels of autonomy. On one end of the spectrum, there are tools like Cursor (agent mode), Manus (general AI agent), OpenManus (open source, coder-oriented version of Manus) that can perform complex tasks on their own and actually modify the environment. On the other end, there are tools like OpenAI Deep Research that can perform complex searches and analysis (yeah it can write & debug it’s code, try it out). Finally, there are tools that is a mixture of human-loops and agents - one that harness both the Agent autonomy and reliability.

This time we will focus on the AI workflow with a quick showcase of Full-autonomous agent like Manus.

1. Build AI-Drive News Summary (relay)

There are so many things happening since since the launch of ChatGPT (and even before that : D) and I find it difficult to stay up to date with all the information.

Don’t get me wrong, there are tons of newsletter services out there - Morning Brew, AlphaSignal, The Rundown etc. However, those ain’t what I needed.

I follow folks on twitter, I subscribe to youtube channels, economy has a deep impact on AI efforts, new policies in EU, my financial times articles… Most of these are not quite covered in these newsletters. Beside, I want to see the trend, the top stories, and only check it out if it catches my eye.

In other words, my requirements are

See latest developments in AI/Finance/US from news, twitter, youtube and my FT channels.
Get a short, succinct summary of daily news.
Can check out articles in detail if I want.

Quite simple, right? However, it’s not so simple to implement from scratch.

1.1 The Cursor Way

Now, the native thinking to implement this is really straight forward - just deal with my requirements one by one. How?

Pull the news - I got inoreader access ($8/month for API access), I got the feeds I want. Then I do Oauth2, get refresh tokens, access tokens, store them and schedule a job to pull the news periodically (could be done locally, or cloud tasks, or AppScript, or… many other tools).

Summarize the news - this step is really simple. I write and tune my prompt, send all the news and what I want to the model, get structured response and then parse it. Gemini has large context window so it’s easy to do without any optimization to save contexts.

Send the updates. Surprisingly not so simple - I set up my flask sever, needed to configure my smtp mail server, set up my Google App passwords, format my contents in markdown, create pdf then send.

Don’t get me wrong, this is totally doable and I have done it. With the help of cursor it took me a large chunk of time, about 4 hours end to end.

And yes, cursor (agent) did the bulk of coding for me. Configuring inoreader oauth and combine it with google auth on supabase was a mess though.

That being said, if you don’t know what RSS feed is, this is another barrier right from the start.

An RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed is a web feed format that allows users to access updates from websites in a standardized, computer-readable format, enabling easy aggregation and consumption of content.
— wikipedia

1.2 The Relay Way

Now, after playing around with the workflow mentioned above. I found one more issue - I need to either runs this locally, or migrate the workflow to AppScript. I could have done it, though at this point I’m out of patience hh. (Turns out to be good thing).

Quite frankly I had no idea what Relay was and has never used Zapier or the like before. I just figured that I need a tool to automate the workflow for me.

This is the entire flow - one that took me ~30 minutes (bulk of time on playing around with format).

In short, this does the same tasks I have mentioned above.

Pull the news - Schedule a run (daily at 6AM), refresh & store tokens (http request), pull the news (http request).

Summarize the news - this step is really simple 2. I bundled all the news I pulled, with some prompts for summary and and instructions for a json output. Gemini 2.5 pro does the job nicely. Most importantly, Gemini API is Free.

Send the updates. Again, super simple now. I literally spend 1 minute add a note to create pdf, 1 minute to create a node to send PDF to my inbox.

Done.

The result?

Sorry about the plain, industrial style summary… Though fancy UI / flashy color could be easily added / configured. See the result here. If you have no access, simply subscribe and you will gain access within an hour.

2. Do the job for me - AI

Now this has unlocked quite a few workflows that I have been thinking of doing for a while.

For example, to keep up with the latest publications across channels, I frequently read journals from Arxiv.org, PubMed, IEEE etc, lots of sites. Quite frankly, the load is overwhelming - especially at the current rate of publication/submissions. Now… all of these support RSS feed - you know what this means : D

I wanted a way to keep up with all my emails - basically a simple CRM and a reminder of what I do. How can this be done? Let’s take a look:

Collect Emails
Summarize Emails to Actions
Send to my inbox / Schedule Calendar events

Each of these steps can be easily done with AI automation tool like relay (and zapier etc).

These tasks are easy when you can map them out - and find tools to just do them simply.

Summarize emails - this step is easily done with AI. How about the events? Well, turns out you can as easily ask gemini to generate required data for scheduling events as well as summaries. Once you have the data, this is done. In Relay (and Zapier, n8n, make etc), you can easily create a human in the loop interaction where you need to confirm the data for next steps. This is a good way to figure out what to schedule & reject the incorrect ones.

Fully autonomous Agentic AI tools is a topic for another day… However, just as we have covered in the last post, all the tools are just not there yet. Some are better, some are worse (manus is on the better end of the spectrum : D).

Final Thoughts - The Future of Workflow Automation

The real power of AI today isn't just in what a single model can do - it's in how we can connect these tools together to solve real problems in our daily lives. As we've seen, workflow automation tools like Relay allow us to bypass the complexities of coding from scratch while still creating powerful, personalized solutions.

A natural next step of this, is asking AI to create the workflow for us. Microsoft (2025) already has an article for this process, and just as the have said AI Agent Workflow creates a more deterministic behavior for the AI workflows that is much more suitable when we want reliability.

Think about it - what repetitive tasks are eating up your time? News summaries? Email organization? Content creation? There's likely a workflow waiting to be built!

💡 Key Takeaways:

AI workflow automation bridges the gap between fully autonomous agents and manual processes
You don't need to be a developer to create powerful AI-driven workflows
Start small with a specific pain point, then expand as you get comfortable

I'd love to see what you build! Share your workflows or drop a comment below with your challenges - Let’s solve it together!

References & Reading List

Acharya, D. B., Kuppan, K., & Divya, B. (2025). Agentic AI: Autonomous Intelligence for Complex Goals – A Comprehensive survey. IEEE Access, 1. https://doi.org/10.1109/access.2025.3532853
Google (2024). What is an AI agent?. https://cloud.google.com/discover/what-are-ai-agents
Github (2025). What are AI Agents? https://github.com/resources/articles/ai/what-are-ai-agents
Microsoft (2025). Introducing agent flows: Transforming automation with AI-first workflows. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-copilot/blog/copilot-studio/introducing-agent-flows-transforming-automation-with-ai-first-workflows/

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