n8n. local.

A step-by-step build using n8n, Ollama, and Docker, no API keys required.

On Monday, I wrote about Google’s I/O keynote and the five overlapping consumer agents they shipped under one brand. Gemini. Gemini Spark. Android Halo. Information Agents in Search. Daily Brief. Five products, a hundred dollars a month, and you still have to figure out which one fits your task.

Operations teams want one working agent on one recurring job this week that they own end-to-end. Google has options on both ends of the spectrum (consumer apps like Gemini Spark and enterprise platforms like Gemini Enterprise). Neither is built for a small ops team looking to operate a recurring task.

Today, we build that agent.

In the next 30 minutes, you’ll have a private AI agent running on your own laptop. It costs zero dollars. No model weights leave your machine. Once the basic loop runs, plugging in a tool turns the agent into something that handles jobs for your team, such as drafting replies in your support inbox, pulling a number from a spreadsheet on a schedule, and triaging incoming customer support requests.

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What you’ll find inside this post

• The full step-by-step setup

• A downloadable n8n workflow file.

• The setup errors you’re likely to hit and how to fix each one.

• Three ways to put the agent on a job your team already does.

• A video walkthrough of the finished agent