A Sunday-night market brief that replaced five browser tabs
A regional metals recycler needed commodity prices, industry news, fuel costs, and sales stats every week. Gathering it by hand took hours. Now one PDF arrives before Monday morning, every week, without being asked.
A regional metals recycler was spending 2-3 hours a week pulling commodity prices, industry news, diesel costs, and internal sales numbers from separate sources before leadership could talk about the week. We built a scheduled workflow that gathers all of it, has an AI write executive commentary, and delivers a finished PDF by email and Slack every Sunday night.
The problem
Metals is a market business. To make good buying and selling decisions each week, leadership needed commodity pricing, industry news, fuel costs, and their own sales stats in front of them — and those live in different places, some behind paywalls, none of them talking to each other.
Assembling the picture manually meant hours of tab-hopping, and it happened inconsistently. Some weeks the research got done; busy weeks it didn't, which were usually the weeks it mattered most.
What we built
A scheduled weekly workflow that does the gathering, the thinking, and the delivery:
- Gathering. The workflow pulls commodity price data, industry news, diesel prices, and the company's own CRM stats — the same sources a person would check, minus the person.
- Commentary. An AI reads the assembled data and writes executive commentary in a fixed format: a TL;DR, what's good, and what to watch. Not a data dump — an actual read on the week.
- Delivery. The brief renders to a PDF and lands by email and Slack before Monday morning, every week, on schedule.
The guardrails
The failure mode for scheduled reports is silence — the workflow breaks quietly and nobody notices until someone asks where the brief went. So error alerting goes to a dedicated Slack channel: if any step fails, a human knows immediately. A report that arrives every week is only trustworthy if its absence is loud.
What changed
One brief now replaces roughly 2-3 hours of weekly manual gathering, and it shows up every Sunday without anyone asking. The consistency turned out to matter as much as the time saved — the brief arrives on the busy weeks too.
The unexpected result: the commentary structure stuck. TL;DR, what's good, what to watch is now how the leadership team talks about the week, in meetings and out. The recycler got a shared vocabulary along with the report.
This was a Sprint-sized engagement — fixed scope, fixed price.
Starting every week with the same manual research?
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