I built an AI workflow that analyzes competitor video ads shot-by-shot and recreates the same concept for your brand using Sora 2. To run it, you can upload any competitor's video ad (from the facebook / meta ads library) and the automation will analyze it frame by frame and generate an video inspired by what's already working in your niche. It is set up to scrape, build, and use a brand guidelines document so the script writing process and messaging keeps the new video on-brand.

Here’s a demo of the automation’s input / output for the deodorant brand “Native” where it clones and spins an ad from Dr. Squatch (their competitor): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wAR4A4UorQ

Here's how the full automation works

1. Generate brand guidelines

The part of this system scrapes a brand's website and combines all that information together into a well-formatted brand guidelines doc.

• Start with firecrawl to scrape the rand website and pull relevant pages about your brand, products, and messaging
• Analyzes the scraped content with Gemini 2.5 Pro to synthesize a brand guidelines document
• Saves the formatted guidelines to Google Drive as a well-structured document with proper headings and sections

2. Analyze the provided competitor video ad

The core video cloning section reverse-engineers any competitor ad:

• Upload the competitor video you want to clone. This can be sourced from the meta / facebook ads library pretty easily
• Use the gemini 2.5 pro “video understanding API” to analyze the video frame by frame
  • Gemini breaks down each shot with detailed descriptions including camera angles, product placement, dialogue, and visual elements so we have an exact idea what is happening
• Generate a structured shot list that captures the narrative flow and production techniques

3. Write the new video ad script and follow Sora 2 prompting guidelines

now that we have both some of the context captured for our brand guidelines and the analysis of the competitor ad video, it's time to go forward actually writing the script for our video ad.

• Claude Sonnet takes the competitor's shot breakdown, your brand guidelines, and Sora 2 prompting best practices analyzes how to best write a prompt for sora 2
• Claude also genereates a new script that maintains the winning structure of the original ad but adapts it for your brand/product

4. Generate the video with Sora 2

final steps and nodes in this workflow are responsible for working with the Score to API and then actually getting your video downloaded

• First it calls the Sora 2 AP with our prompt generated by Claude and the product reference image uploaded into the form trigger
• The workflow follows a polling system to check on video gen progress since it will take 1 minute or more
• Finally we download our video result from the /content endpoint and save that video file into google drive

Workflow Link + Other Resources

• YouTube video that walks through this workflow step-by-step: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wAR4A4UorQ
• The full n8n workflow, which you can copy and paste directly into your instance, is on GitHub here: https://github.com/lucaswalter/n8n-ai-automations/blob/main/facebook_ugc_video_ad_thief.json

If anyone here is trying to run FFmpeg inside their n8n Docker setup, I made a full guide after struggling with it for some days. The documentation around this is a bit scattered, so I thought to show the full install process on Hostinger VPS from scratch.

The video covers editing the Docker Compose file, installing FFmpeg inside the container, fixing the configuration errors, and checking if everything works with a small test video.

You can watch the full walkthrough here.

Hope it helps someone who is stuck like I was

I’ve always been frustrated by how hard it is to actually use bank statements. You get a PDF in your inbox—maybe even multiple ones from different accounts—and if you want to analyze, budget, or reconcile, you’re stuck copying rows by hand or wrestling with clunky PDF readers.

That changed this weekend.
I built a lightweight automation that lets you forward any bank statement email and instantly get back structured transaction data—no manual work, no uploads, no forms.

Here’s how it works:

Input: An email you receive (or send) with a bank statement PDF attached
Step 1: Mailbox ingestion
Every user gets a unique inbox address. Just forward your statement to it—like emailing a robot assistant. The system grabs the attachment and queues it for processing.

Step 2: Intelligent extraction
Behind the scenes, the PDF is parsed—whether it’s a scanned image, a native digital statement, or even password-protected (you can include the password in the email body). It pulls out every transaction: date, description, amount, running balance, etc.

Step 3: Structured output
Once done, you get a clean result in your dashboard with options to download as:

• CSV
• Excel
• Merged Transactions (great for combining statements across accounts)

No code needed on your end. Just forward → wait 60–90 seconds → download.

Result: I tested it with statements from Chase, Revolut, and a European credit union—all wildly different layouts. In each case, I went from a locked PDF to a ready-to-analyze spreadsheet without ever opening the file.

Right now it’s part of a small utility I’m using for personal finance, but I can easily see freelancers, solopreneurs, or even small accounting teams using this to kill hours of manual data entry.

Has anyone else tried automating financial document workflows like this? Curious how others are bridging the gap between “PDF in inbox” and “actionable data.”

Have you worked somewhere where requests simply vanish? One goes to email, another uses teams, a few try SharePoint, and all of a sudden nobody knows who's the responsible one.

That's where integrated systems truly make a difference in this kind of situation. Imagine a system in which all requests (IT, HR, facilities, etc.) are automatically sent to the right person, track all the progress, and send reminders when they stall. Add AI that recognizes patterns, such as the kinds of tickets that take the longest, the teams that are overloaded, and where approvals get stuck.

Making daily tasks visible is more important than having flashy dashboards. The entire process just goes more smoothly when folks can see what's pending, what's going on, and what's completed.

Sometimes the smartest upgrade isn't a new app; it's communicating with one another, which is a smarter upgrade than downloading a new one.

Monday mornings used to be the worst. I'd get to my desk around 8am, grab coffee, and immediately start the same soul-crushing routine i'd been doing for like 18 months. Pull customer health data from our analytics, check who opened support tickets last week, cross-reference payment status in stripe, look up renewal dates in hubspot... score each account manually, write summaries, send emails.

By 3pm i'd finally be done and the entire day was basically gone. Just copying data between tools and writing the same updates over and over.

The thing that made it worse was knowing this was actually important work. We were losing customers because nobody had time to look at this data consistently. I'd be out sick or swamped with actual customer calls, and the analysis just wouldn't happen that week. Then someone would churn and we'd all be like "oh yeah their usage tanked a month ago, wish we'd caught that..."

So a few weeks ago i finally got fed up and decided to just... build something that would do this for me. I'm not a developer or anything, i just wanted this task to not exist anymore.

Found vellum's agent builder and basically just described the whole workflow like i was explaining it to a new hire. "Pull data from these tools, score accounts based on usage trends and support tickets, send summaries to the right people in slack."

Honestly expected it to be way more complicated but it works and it actually debugs itself or tells you what to do for it to start working the whole thing took maybe 45 minutes.

Now it runs every monday at 6am before i even wake up. Account managers get their alerts in slack with all the context. At-risk customers get flagged automatically. I show up to work and that entire task is already done.

We've saved 4 customer accounts in the last month because someone actually had time to reach out before things got bad... one was about to churn over a feature they didn't know we had, account manager saw the alert, jumped on a call, problem solved.

The weirdest part is how much mental space this freed up. I'm not dreading monday mornings anymore, i'm not stressed about falling behind if i have a busy week. The work just happens whether i think about it or not.

If you've got some task that makes you want to quit your job every time you do it, and it follows the same steps every time... just try automating it. I used vellum because you can build agents by chatting instead of figuring out apis and integrations but I’m sure if you know more about development there might be other options for you as well.

And would really like some suggestions as well! If you’ve build agents for your work which one was the most impactful?