Onboarding — Customer Gamma SpA — week 4 of 6. Completed: contract setup (Legal), billing configuration (Finance), environment configuration (IT, yesterday). Current step: technical block on a specific configuration. IT lead has been waiting for a customer decision for 3 days. Deadline: Friday. Escalation triggered: notification to CSM with 3 alternatives proposed.
AGENT · WORKFLOW COORDINATOR
Complex workflows coordinate themselves without the manager chasing them manually.
Workflow Coordinator coordinates multi-step workflows that involve several people on activities distributed over time: end-to-end claim handling, new B2B customer onboarding with multiple steps, change management on a company system. It sends reminders, triggers escalation, and tracks status. The process owner steps in only at decision points.
Workflow Coordinator at work.
I'll propose the standard configuration to the customer. I'll handle the call myself.
Decision recorded. Notification sent to the IT lead with instructions to proceed. CRM update complete.
Why it exists.
Complex operational workflows typically share these traits: multiple people involved, step sequences with dependencies, intermediate deadlines, escalation decisions when a step stalls, and a final trace for audit. The operational problem is rarely a lack of clarity about the process — written procedures usually exist. The problem is operational coordination.
How it coordinates every instance.
Workflow Coordinator takes on the operational coordination. For every active workflow instance in the system: it monitors step status, sends reminders to the owners of upcoming steps, triggers escalation when a step exceeds the silence threshold, and tracks state on the destination system (CRM, ticketing, the customer's management system).
The decision stays with the team.
The process owner receives a periodic summary and steps in only at decision points. The agent does not replace human judgement — it frees it from the chasing.
Three operational functions that reclaim the time lost to manual chasing.
Process owner
Claim handling manager, B2B customer success manager, IT change manager: reclaims the time spent on manual operational coordination. Steps in only at decision points, not to chase colleagues.
Auto liability · #2024-0847
Current reserve € 4,200
Proposed reserve € 3,850
Underwriting aligned ✓
Proposal ready · awaiting adjuster
Owners of intermediate steps
Receive their tasks in the work channel they already use, with the context ready. They do not need to navigate a dedicated BPM system.
Claim type Auto liability
Severity Medium
Adjuster Dr. Ferrari · Northeast
Initial reserve € 4,200
Routed ✓
Compliance officer
Has an inspectable trace of every workflow instance. For regulatory audits (e.g., IVASS for claim handling, banking supervisors for change management on critical systems), the export is a standard SQL query.
fnol.receive 09:14:22 ALLOW
triage.classify 09:14:25 ALLOW
idd.check 09:14:31 WARN
liquidation.propose 09:15:02 ALLOW
SELECT * FROM audit_log WHERE claim_id = '2024-0847'
A six-week B2B onboarding coordinated without manual intervention.
Eight steps across five teams, from contract to kickoff.
For a regulated B2B SaaS company with a six-week customer onboarding workflow across eight steps distributed over five teams (sales, legal, billing, IT setup, customer success), the agent is integrated with the customer's systems. The new customer signs the contract. The onboarding workflow instance starts. The agent identifies the eight expected steps, assigns each owner, and activates the first step.
Three weeks in sequence, status always in the CRM.
Over the first three weeks the teams proceed in sequence: legal, billing, IT setup. The agent sends reminders to owners of upcoming steps before the deadline, tracks status in the CRM, and updates the customer success manager on progress.
The IT block becomes a CSM decision with three alternatives.
In week four, the IT setup hits a technical block waiting for a customer decision. The agent recognises the block pattern and triggers structured escalation: it notifies the IT lead with the block detail, sends the customer success manager a summary, and proposes three concrete alternatives. The IT lead picks the first alternative; the agent prepares the customer communication. Weeks five and six complete the onboarding. The full event stays in the runtime audit registry.
Declarative workflow schema, version-controlled, validated at startup.
Workflow Coordinator's rules are declarative. The customer's process owner team defines in a human-readable format the workflow schema (steps, owners, dependencies, deadlines), the reminder rules (frequency, content), and the escalation rules (silence thresholds, escalation levels, proposed alternatives). Rules live in the customer's repository, version-controlled, validated at agent startup.
- Language
- TypeScript (Node.js)
- LLM model
- customer's choice: Anthropic, OpenAI, Mistral, open source models hosted internally, AWS Bedrock for a private model
- Built-in controls used
- pii-detector, topic-guardrail, tool-rate-limit
- Native notification channels
- Slack, Telegram, WhatsApp, OpenAI-compatible HTTP
- CRM integration
- HubSpot native; other CRMs via delivery
- Customer's existing BPM system integration
- dedicated adapter delivered during the project
- Memory
- persistent per instance, pgvector + PostgreSQL FTS on historical workflow instances
- Registry
- immutable, queryable with a standard SQL client
Frequently asked questions about the agent.
No. Workflow Coordinator operates on top of the customer's existing BPM system (or the CRM/ticketing system that manages the workflow), adding the layer of conversational coordination and structured escalation. The underlying system stays where it is.
Declarative rules support dependencies between steps (sequential or parallel). For parallel steps, the agent coordinates the separate branches independently until the convergence point, where it waits for all preceding branches to complete before activating the next step.
Changes to the workflow schema live in the customer's repository, version-controlled. When the process owner team updates the schema, instances already in progress continue on the previous schema (immutable versioning per instance); new instances start on the updated schema. The versioning rule is declarative in the repository.
The typical pattern for Workflow Coordinator is 8-12 weeks. Discovery 2 weeks, workflow schema configuration and escalation rules 3-4 weeks, integration with the CRM or BPM system 2-3 weeks, hand-off to the process owner 1-2 weeks.
From a 30-minute conversation to the squad in production.
A 30-45 minute conversation to understand how Workflow Coordinator would be configured for the customer's case. Which workflow, which systems, which escalation schema.