Agentic workflows — Multi-agent AI orchestration in production

Three disciplines. **Explicit orchestration** (no opaque AutoGPT-style auto-orchestration): every step declared in n8n, every transition documented, every LLM call traced. **Human checkpoints** on risky steps: final publish, spend > threshold, source allowlist exit. **Source and tool allowlist**: an agent can only query sources and call tools explicitly declared in its scope. If you want "an agent that does everything alone", we are not the right partner.

**Mixed by step criticality.** Claude (Anthropic) for long-form writing, complex reasoning, factual validation (observed superior quality on these tasks in our workflows). OpenAI GPT-4o for multi-modal tasks (image, table structure) and steps where speed matters more than depth. Open-source models via Groq for low-criticality steps (simple classification, field extraction) to optimize costs. The LLM choice per step is explicit and arbitrated at scoping.

It varies with volume and complexity. On the think-tank case, monthly inference cost remains **below 200 EUR** for 5 workflows running daily and producing 143+ long-form articles over the period. Levers: premium vs. low-cost LLM arbitration by criticality, request batching, response caching on stable sources. A FinOps dashboard ships with the chain for monitoring and alerts.

Yes — that is even the most frequent target use case. **n8n** has native connectors for most CRMs (HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Microsoft Dynamics), ERPs (SAP, Odoo, Oracle), DAM, ESP, and collaboration tools (Slack, Teams, Notion). For proprietary systems without a native connector, we write a custom connector or expose a thin API layer. Access and secret governance is framed at Intake.

**4 to 12 weeks** depending on complexity. For a typical editorial chain with 3-5 workflows and standard connectors (CMS, mailing, slides), plan **4 to 6 weeks**: 2 weeks of scoping and design, 2-3 weeks of development and tests, 1 week of hyper-care. For complex chains integrating internal systems and multiple HITL, **8 to 12 weeks**.