Autopilot — AI-Powered Newsletter Generation

Autopilot is Broadcast’s AI-powered newsletter generator. It pulls content from your favorite web sources — RSS feeds, GitHub repositories, and webpages — analyzes what is new, and drafts complete newsletter editions for you. Instead of spending hours curating links and writing summaries, you review and pick from AI-generated drafts, then send.

Key Benefits

  • Save hours every week — Autopilot handles the research, summarization, and writing so you can focus on strategy and editing.
  • Consistent output — Every edition follows your structure and tone, even when you are short on time or inspiration.
  • Multiple variations — Generate up to five different drafts per run and pick the one that resonates most.
  • Bring your own key (BYOK) — Autopilot uses OpenRouter to access a wide range of AI models. You control the model, the cost, and the quality.

Prerequisites

Before you can use Autopilot, you need three things:

  1. An OpenRouter API key — Autopilot sends prompts through OpenRouter, which gives you access to models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and others. Sign up at openrouter.ai and generate an API key.
  2. Content sources — At least one RSS feed, GitHub repo, or webpage for Autopilot to pull content from.
  3. A schedule (optional) — Decide how often you want Autopilot to generate drafts. You can also run it manually whenever you like.

Getting Started

  1. Open a sequence and navigate to the Autopilot tab
  2. Go to Settings
  3. Enter your OpenRouter API key
  4. Select an AI model — different models offer different tradeoffs between speed, cost, and quality
  5. Head to the Sources section and add your content sources

Content Source Types

Autopilot supports three types of content sources. You can mix and match them freely.

RSS Feeds

Point Autopilot at any RSS or Atom feed. Configure:

  • Max items — Limit how many feed items to include per run
  • Days to look back — Only pull items published within this window (e.g., the last 7 days)

RSS feeds are great for blog aggregation, industry news roundups, and tracking publications you want to curate.

GitHub Repositories

Track activity in any public GitHub repository. Choose which activity types to include:

  • Commits — Recent code changes
  • Pull requests — New or merged PRs
  • Issues — Newly opened or closed issues
  • Releases — Published releases and changelogs

For private repositories, provide a GitHub Personal Access Token (PAT) with appropriate repo permissions. Autopilot will use it to authenticate when fetching data.

Webpages

Scrape content directly from any webpage. Fine-tune what gets extracted:

  • CSS selector targeting — Specify a CSS selector to grab content from a specific part of the page (e.g., article.post-content or #main-body)
  • Exclude selectors — Remove unwanted sections like navigation, sidebars, or footers from the extracted content

Webpage sources are ideal for pulling content from sites that do not offer RSS feeds.

Source Priority

Every source has a priority setting from 1 to 10. Higher-priority sources get more prominence in the generated newsletter. Use this to ensure your most important content sources always take center stage while supplementary sources fill in the gaps.

Generation Settings

Fine-tune how Autopilot writes your newsletters in the Settings tab.

Copies to Generate

Choose between 1 and 5 draft variations per run. Generating multiple copies gives you options — you can pick the best one, or mix and match sections from different drafts.

Tone Description

Describe the voice you want Autopilot to use. Be specific: instead of “professional,” try “friendly and knowledgeable, like a colleague sharing interesting finds over coffee.” The more detail you provide, the better the output matches your brand.

Content Instructions

Give Autopilot explicit guidance on what to emphasize, what to skip, and how to frame the content. For example: “Focus on practical takeaways. Skip anything that is purely promotional. Always include a one-sentence summary for each item.”

Newsletter Structure Template

Define the structure of your newsletter using a template. This tells Autopilot how to organize the content — for example, a greeting, a featured story section, a quick links roundup, and a closing note. The AI follows this structure for every edition, keeping your newsletter consistent.

Quick Start Presets

Not sure where to begin? Autopilot includes six presets that pre-fill the tone, instructions, and structure for common newsletter formats:

  • Tech/Developer — Technical content with code-aware summaries
  • Company Update — Internal or external company news roundups
  • Community Digest — Community activity and highlights
  • Product Changelog — Release notes and feature announcements
  • Curated Links — Link roundup with commentary
  • Industry News — Sector-specific news briefings

Select a preset to get started quickly, then customize it to match your needs.

Tone Samples

Provide 1 to 3 examples of your own writing style. These samples help the AI match your voice more accurately than a tone description alone. Paste in paragraphs from previous newsletters, blog posts, or emails that represent how you want to sound.

Schedule Options

Set Autopilot to run on a recurring schedule:

  • Daily — A fresh draft every day
  • Weekly — One draft per week on a day you choose
  • Biweekly — Every two weeks
  • Monthly — Once a month

All schedules respect the timezone you configure, so drafts are generated at a predictable local time.

Running Autopilot

Scheduled Runs

Once your schedule is set and Autopilot is active, it runs automatically at the configured interval. You do not need to do anything — drafts will be waiting for you when you log in.

Manual Runs

Click Run Now to trigger Autopilot immediately, regardless of the schedule. This is useful when you want to send an off-cycle edition or test your configuration.

Pipeline Stages

When Autopilot runs, it moves through four stages:

  1. Fetching — Pulling content from your configured sources
  2. Analyzing — Processing and ranking the fetched content
  3. Generating — Writing newsletter drafts based on your settings
  4. Review — Drafts are ready for your review

You can monitor progress in real time from the Autopilot tab.

Reviewing and Selecting Content

After a run completes, you will see your generated drafts. Read through each variation and select the one you like best. You can also edit the selected draft before moving forward — Autopilot gives you a starting point, not a final product.

Creating a Broadcast from Autopilot

Once you have selected and optionally edited a draft, click to create a broadcast from it. This takes the content and drops it into a new broadcast, pre-filled and ready to configure. From there, you follow the normal broadcast workflow — choose your audience, set your subject line, preview, and send or schedule.

Troubleshooting

  • No content generated — Check that your sources are reachable and returning content. For RSS feeds, verify the feed URL loads in a browser. For GitHub repos, confirm the PAT has the right permissions.
  • Low-quality output — Try a more capable AI model, add more detail to your tone description and content instructions, or provide tone samples.
  • Missing content from sources — Check the “days to look back” setting. If it is too narrow, recent content might not be captured. Also verify source priority — low-priority sources may be underrepresented.
  • Schedule not running — Confirm that Autopilot is set to active and the timezone is correct.

Best Practices

Start with a preset and customize. The quick start presets give you a solid foundation. Run a few test generations, review the output, and tweak the tone and structure until it matches your expectations.

Use tone samples. They make a bigger difference than you might expect. Even one or two good samples dramatically improve how closely the AI matches your voice.

Review every edition. Autopilot is a drafting tool, not a publishing tool. Always read through the generated content before sending it to your subscribers. Check facts, verify links, and add your personal touch.

Adjust source priorities regularly. As your content landscape changes, revisit which sources should get top billing. A source that was critical last quarter might be less relevant now.

Want to target specific groups with your automated emails? Learn about Segments to send the right content to the right subscribers.