Keeping up with AI innovation news feels impossible most days. Product launches drop daily. Leadership changes reshape the competitive field. Strategic partnerships shift industry dynamics overnight.
For businesses trying to stay informed, this creates a real challenge. Miss one announcement and you could overlook an opportunity that impacts your operations. But manually tracking dozens of sources every day pulls focus from the work that matters.
At SoftSnow, staying current isn't optional. Our clients depend on us to guide them through AI transformation, which means we need to know what's coming before it arrives. So we built something to solve this problem: an AI agent that monitors the news landscape and delivers a curated daily digest straight to our team.
Here's how we did it, and why this approach works for any industry.
How to Build an RSS News Aggregation Agent
Before jumping into tools and workflows, our team started with a simple question: what sources actually matter?
This step takes time, but it's the foundation everything else builds on. We identified the products we needed to track, the companies shaping our industry, and the leaders whose insights move markets. The goal was to capture what's relevant for our business.
Once you know your sources, the technical setup becomes straightforward. But without this curation step, you end up with noise instead of signal.
Think about your own industry. Which platforms are releasing features that could change how you work? Which competitors are making moves you need to watch? Which thought leaders consistently spot trends early? That's your starting point.
Building the Agent: Orchestration Over Complexity
The RSS News Feed Agent connects six tools into one automated workflow. Each piece handles a specific job. Together, they turn scattered information into actionable intelligence.
Here's the flow:
- RSS.app aggregates content from the sources we identified. We created custom feeds for specific products, companies, and industry leaders. This consolidates dozens of potential sources into organized streams.
- Zapier automatically moves that data into a Google Spreadsheet, where everything collects in one place. No manual imports. No copy-pasting links. The stories flow in as they publish.
- Here's where it gets interesting. Even with automation, we hit a problem: AI agents struggle when spreadsheets have certain formulas or connectors. We needed a way to let the AI agent properly read the most recent stories.
- Google App Script solved this. Our team wrote a small script that timestamps the spreadsheet every hour. This forces the system to recognize when data updates occur, which keeps the agent looking at fresh content instead of outdated stories. Without this step, the agent would often miss new articles or pull from the wrong time period.
- With clean, current data ready, Cassidy takes over. This AI orchestration platform runs our retrieval agent. We built a prompt that tells the agent exactly what to look for: the specific date range, the format we want, and which insights matter most for our work. It reads the spreadsheet, summarizes the key developments, and posts the digest to a dedicated Slack channel once per day.
The whole system runs on autopilot. We wake up to relevant news, organized and ready to review.
How AI Retrieval Agents Save Time and Improve Decisions
The RSS News Feed Agent isn't just for AI companies tracking innovation. The same structure works for any business that needs to stay informed without dedicating hours to manual research.
A marketing agency we work with adapted this approach to monitor its clients' industries. Instead of tracking AI products, they follow retail trends, consumer behavior studies, and competitor campaigns. Their version runs the same workflow with different sources, giving their account teams industry context before client calls.
The pattern applies everywhere. Legal teams can track regulatory changes. Sales teams can monitor prospect companies for trigger events. Product teams can watch for feature announcements from competitors.
What matters is the orchestration. Each tool handles one job well. The agent connects them into a system that delivers value consistently.
What Makes an AI Agent Valuable
The RSS News Feed Agent demonstrates how effective AI adoption works. You identify a pain point. You design a solution that fits your workflow. You test, refine, and scale what works.
Retrieval agents are particularly valuable because they connect scattered information into accessible knowledge. Whether you're tracking industry news, monitoring customer feedback, or aggregating internal reports, the same principles apply. Curate your sources, automate the collection, and let AI surface the insights that matter.
The best part? This doesn't require a data science team or a massive budget. It requires clear thinking about what information you need and how you want to receive it.
Our team now starts every day with relevant context instead of scrambling to catch up. We spot emerging trends early and advise clients. The agent handles the scanning. We handle the strategy. That's what good AI implementation looks like: removing low-value work to create space for high-value thinking.
Build Your Own Industry Intelligence Agent
Every business needs to stay informed, but not every business has time for manual monitoring. A custom retrieval agent can transform how your team accesses the information that drives better decisions.
Let's talk about what this could look like for your organization. What sources do you need to monitor? What insights would help your team move faster? We'll help you design the agents and workflows that deliver daily value.
Reach out to start a conversation about your specific business needs.
