Workflows are inputs, steps, and outputs—I told you I’d say that a lot. We know each step in the automation is a node, but then there’s this arrow. That arrow is saying: when you grab that lead in Salesforce, that email or row in Google Sheets, that’s the one I want you to enrich or summarize or update. We have to be able to pass information between nodes.
Let’s say I want my flow to read an email, summarize it with AI, and DM me on Slack with that summary. Not a high VCI workflow, but baby steps—we’re just getting started.
To read my latest email, I can grab the Gmail reader—that’s the first step in our flow. I’ll configure it to retrieve emails from a specific folder and only grab one. If I run this, I get all the information about the email.
Now we want to summarize that email with AI. Go to the node library, pick Ask AI, and my prompt’s gonna be “summarize the following email.” Right here is where I want to pass the body of the email from the previous node.
To make an output of a node available in another node in Gumloop is a two-step process. First, we connect the nodes by dragging from the output of one to the next node. When they’re connected, we can see the inputs populated from that node. Then we can drag the input we need into our prompt—or type @ and select the right input.
If we run our flow, it will execute every step: read the email and then summarize it. The final step is to DM myself that summary on Slack. I’ll grab the Slack message sender, configure it to send to myself, and connect it to pass the response as the message.
You can also connect multiple nodes together. Let’s say I want the sender’s email in the message as well—I can connect those nodes and pass both pieces of information. Now if we run the whole flow: grabbing the email, summarizing it, and sending it to myself. We’ve created our first automation.
The principles are the same for more complicated flows. As practice, I’m going to include a few flows where you’ll have the nodes but unconnected. Your challenge is to connect them together and pass the information in the right place.
