The Scenario
It's 7:45 AM. You're a startup founder who reads the news — specifically US tech and business headlines — every morning before standup. You've been doing it manually: three tabs open, scanning headlines, occasionally copy-pasting something into a Notion doc.
Your assistant mentioned last week that you could probably automate the briefing. You didn't follow up. This morning you opened the same three tabs again and realized you were doing the same thing for the sixty-third time.
The bad version:
- Visit three or four news sites, scan headlines manually, decide which ones are relevant to your business
- Copy interesting titles and URLs into a notes doc or email yourself links
- Realize on Friday that you didn't save Thursday's briefing anywhere useful
A morning briefing is most valuable when it's consistent, searchable, and already in a format you can annotate. A tab-by-tab scan is none of those things.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads your sheet, connects to News API's top-headlines endpoint, and writes the morning's results directly into your briefing sheet.
Fetch today's top US business and technology headlines from News API and write each article's title, source name, description, and URL into columns A through D, then add a FetchedOn timestamp in column E using today's date
What You Get
- Column A: article headline
- Column B: source name
- Column C: article description or lede (as returned by News API)
- Column D: direct article URL
- Column E: date fetched (today's date in YYYY-MM-DD format)
- One row per headline, newest first, covering both the business and technology categories
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
You want to flag headlines that mention specific topics
From the headlines now in Sheet1, find any article titles that mention AI, fintech, or SaaS and write the matching keyword into column F; leave column F blank if none match
The description field is empty for some sources
Fetch today's US technology and business headlines from News API into Sheet1; for any row where the description in column C is empty, write "No description" as a placeholder
You want a keyword frequency summary alongside the raw headlines
From the headlines in Sheet1 column A, count how many times each of these terms appears: AI, SaaS, funding, acquisition, layoffs — and write the counts into a summary table in Sheet2 with Keyword in column A and Count in column B
One prompt that fetches, flags, and summarizes the morning
Pull today's top US tech and business headlines from News API into Sheet1 with title, source, description, and URL in columns A through D; flag each headline in column E with the first matching keyword from this list: AI, fintech, SaaS, IPO, acquisition — then write a keyword frequency summary in Sheet2
The goal is a briefing you can scan in two minutes and archive without any manual effort.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open a blank Google Sheet, then ask it to pull this morning's top headlines from News API and populate your briefing sheet. For related workflows, see how to track breaking news on a specific topic or pull historical coverage by month. Full overview: News API + Google Sheets.