What was In The Loop?
In The Loop 2026 was an event hosted by n8n in Berlin, which brought together nearly 1,200 “engineers, technical leaders, and decision-makers who are shaping automation’s future”. It had two parts: an invite-only Partner’s Day on October 13th, and an open Ecosystem Day on the 14th.
Grist Labs was invited to exhibit, partly because of our built-in app nodes (and credentials!) that enable n8n-powered automations with Grist data. We’ve made videos going how these automations look and how to set them up, and have had a great experience overall with n8n’s toolset.
The event was well-run and well appointed, and it was a privilege to attend and meet so many excited and engaged n8n employees, ambassadors, partners, and automation experts. There was also a basketball arcade game which challenged our dexterity and competitive mindset, though we refuse to disclose who had the high score.
Three of us were lucky enough to go, each from very different parts of the world and with varying domain expertise. We figured it would be neat to show three separate perspectives on the same event, which will hopefully capture the huge breadth of topics encapsulated by modern workflow automation.
Below are three different looks at the event and what it says about the current and future states of AI-powered workflows, automations, and software at large.
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Three perspectives
Content & community
Nick Bush, Senior Content Strategist
Rebrand
The event was literally highlighted with pink, related to n8n’s new branding. Accent lights and little pink touches everywhere. Very nice.
There’s a new logo as well, which is simple and clear. It also kind of looks like stitches, and a more vulgar person could argue that n8n sutures together today’s injured data workflows, keeping them alive. But I am not so vulgar.
How AI impacts community-building
In CEO Jan Oberhauser’s keynote on Partner Day, he mentioned that with AI in the picture, “everything else” should be reliable. This tracks for company built on connecting things together – it doesn’t matter what kind of liquid you’re pumping, if the pipes are bad you’ll get leaks. And everyone’s pumping a lot more liquid these days.
He also mentioned that though building is easier with AI, other things are harder: discovery, trust, governance and choice. Later that day, Gonzalo Rosado Morgan from Canva talked about community building, which had been and remains hard: AI can’t build a community. This is partly why he argues that with AI, a community is your biggest advantage.
The very same day there was another session that touched on this, one about planning a great community event (I didn’t note the speaker’s name!). One of the pillars was that especially with AI, in-person interactions are key.
Finally, both days of the event were full of official n8n ambassadors, who organize and host (with n8n’s support) events all over the world. They’re already doing over one event per day, on average. That’s a lot of unautomatable product awareness and social proof! I talked with a lot of ambassadors during the conference, and they were consistently excited to be part of the program.
Exhibition impressions & automation
Jarosław Sadziński, Software Engineer
- Many people said that there’s a steep learning curve in all app builders in the market, and that it’s hard to learn new layouts and UIs, there are too many new apps out there, so people are naturally withdrawn. And Grist with its clean, spreadsheet-like interface is easy to learn and feels very intuitive.
- Most people that were interested in Grist had messy spreadsheets or were trying to integrate a spreadsheet with another service. They saw Grist as a way to structure the data for easier integrations.
- n8n (the company) is automating a lot internally. There was a talk where they showed how they automated all customer tickets, with most tickets handled from start to finish by bots. The amount of tickets used to be unbearable, but now they have it under control.
- Building community is as important as having a business partner, and I think has led to an entire ecosystem around n8n.
- AI scraping is a hot topic.
GTM strategy, sales and partners
Stefano Maffulli, Chief Revenue Officer
I was mostly keyed into the big changes announced for n8n’s go-to-market strategy, and was able to attend a few sessions when I wasn’t at the booth. Most of the talks focused on n8n’s well-developed and expansive partner strategy.
But first: GTM. The big shift is positioning n8n as an AI orchestration layer. They showed new AI-based automations capable of doing contract reviews, invoice and PO extraction, etc.
Now that 60% of Fortune 500 companies use and depend on n8n, those use cases a key focus. Their buyers are interested in security and reliability – speakers emphasized this a lot across most talks I followed as a crucial advantage of n8n with its traceability, logs, etc.
Focus on partners
Their sales team grew from 2 to 150 people in 2 years. The partnership program started 18 months ago. Partners account for half of the sales pipeline, and a third of revenue has partners involved.
They established a post-sales team (customer success and account managers) to increase adoption and reduce churn, leading to faster time to first workflow and to an impressive increase in live workflows in production 12 months after the first.
To partners they suggested to focus on starting one use case in the company, find an executive sponsor, set rules for governance of the n8n instance early on.
For 2027 their sales focus will be on critical use cases and moving to a “partners first” motion. The assumption is that partners know more about the geography and the industry-specific issues.
Achtung!
No, there’s no warning. Just poor pinball performance, as you can see.
An excellent event in a great city. A special shout out to Amandine Dugrain for helping get us there in the first place.
If you’re new to Grist and looking for a secure spreadsheet replacement built on a database that enables the easiest custom dashboards, please get in touch. It also plays very nicely with n8n.
