When a deal gets marked as won in your CRM, a notification fires to the sales manager. An approval workflow kicks off. The record gets updated in the pipeline. These are hard processes — deterministic steps that must happen every single time, with zero exceptions. Asking an LLM to decide whether these steps should happen is a fundamental design error.
Deterministic workflows, intelligent context
CRM workflows, approval chains, notifications, and status transitions belong in the connector and automation layer. They're triggered by events, not by judgment. The LLM adds value in a different way — it helps draft the follow-up email, suggests next steps based on the deal context, or identifies patterns across the pipeline. Claude brings intelligence within the guardrails. It doesn't decide whether the guardrails apply.
This distinction matters more than most businesses realise. Every process that can be expressed as a deterministic rule should be. The LLM's role is to handle the spaces between those rules — the contextual, judgment-based work that rigid systems can't do. Getting this split right is the difference between a deployment that works and one that produces expensive surprises.