How I Built an AI Agent That Actually Knows My Business (Using Needle remote MCP + n8n)
⚡ Super-charge n8n with Needle’s Remote MCP - Your Weekend Build Guide
TL;DR
Plug the Needle Remote MCP endpoint into n8n’s AI Agent node and let GPT-4o (or Turbo) search, summarise, and update every PDF, slide deck, Jira ticket, or email in seconds … no servers … no vector-DB babysitting … just an HTTPS URL and a Bearer token.
Why this matters
LLMs without context are parrots. Needle pipes your content (Google Drive, Gmail, Jira, etc.) through Retrieval-Augmented Generation, so answers are accurate and source-cited.
n8n already runs your automations. Add a chat front-end and the AI Agent becomes your help-desk, research assistant, and content repurposer.
Remote MCP = zero infra. The Needle team runs the Model Context Protocol server for you at
https://mcp.needle-ai.com/mcp… all you do is call it.
1. Prerequisites
Needle API key Dashboard → Settings → Generate Key.
OpenAI key gpt-4o-turbo
Collections with data Drag PDFs in … or connect Gmail / Drive via the Needle UI first.
2. Add the Needle credential in n8n 🔑
Credentials → + New → Header Auth
Name:
Needle MCP AuthHeader Name:
Authorization
Value:
Bearer sk-live-••••••Save.
In this regard it is very important you really do put the word Bearer.
3. Wire up the AI Agent graph
4. Smoke-test in 60 seconds
Activate the workflow.
In the side-panel chat, type “List my Needle collections.”
Follow up:
Search my Research collection for passages on LLM hallucinations.👉 The agent calls
needle_search… streams back quoted text and the source file.Bonus:
Add https://needle-ai.com to my Research collection as ‘Needle homepage’.The
needle_add_filetool fires … watch the status in Needle flip from pending → indexed
6. Real-world recipes
Use case Trigger What your Agent does
Instant Zendesk replies New ticket ↗︎ Agent searches Support Docs … drafts answer … updates ticket.
Sales one-pager Deal moves to Proposal in HubSpot Pulls latest pricing PDF + customer case … summarises to 3 bullets … emails rep.
Weekly research digest Cron Friday 9 AM Searches ArXiv collection for last 7 days … GPT-4o summarises top 5 … posts to Slack.
7. Best practices
Prompt concretely. “Search the Contracts collection for the SLA clause” beats “find the thing.”
Chunk big uploads. 50-page PDFs? Needle auto-splits, but multiple smaller docs index faster in parallel.
Cache frequent queries. Use n8n’s Data Store to store yesterday’s results … skip the Needle call if unchanged.
8. Steal this one-liner for Monday’s demo 🎤
“We wired Needle’s remote MCP into n8n … now Slack can answer any policy question and cite the PDF on Confluence … in about 800 ms.”
Drop mic … watch jaws hit the floor.
Ready to build?
Tweet @Needle_AI what you’ve automated … we’re retweeting the coolest flows all week.
Happy threading! 🧵