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Every company has its own paths: who reviews a contract, who approves an invoice, when a matter goes to the board. Everyone knows them, but until now writing them down in a system meant sitting down with a process editor. In CONTMAN Workflow you can simply describe the workflow in plain words. An AI assistant connected to CONTMAN over MCP turns that description into a workflow definition, which you can look at as a diagram before the first process starts.
What the Model Context Protocol is, and what the assistant does in the other modules, is covered in CONTMAN speaks the language of AI. MCP in every module. This post is about one thing: how easy it becomes to design a process.
A description instead of a diagram
An example. An office manager writes to the assistant:
Supplier contracts: once a contract is archived, the legal team reviews it within two working days. If the contract is worth more than PLN 50,000, the board approves it. Then the CEO and the CFO sign it, in that order, and finally the person who added the contract gets a notification.
From that, the assistant:
- Checks what is already in the archive. It reads the document categories, their fields and the existing workflow definitions, so it builds on what already works.
- Adds missing fields. If the "Contracts" category has no field for the contract's value, the assistant can add one, provided you let it work in the categories and fields area.
- Builds a draft workflow. A start when the document is archived, a review by the "Legal" role with a deadline in working days, a branch based on the value taken from the contract's field, the board's approval, signatures in a set order and an automatic step that sends the notification.
- Checks whether the workflow can be published. CONTMAN lists everything that stands in the way. The assistant fixes the draft and checks it again.
The finished draft waits among your workflow definitions. You open it in the editor and see the whole process as a diagram: steps, transitions and conditions. If you want to change something, you tell the assistant or adjust it in the editor yourself.
What you can design in a conversation
- Approvals. A step with a task and a decision, assigned to a specific person, to a role (the task then lands in the team's queue), to a person named during the process, or to the person who started it.
- Branches. The document takes one of several paths depending on a condition, such as an amount recorded in one of its fields.
- Automatic steps. Notifying people and roles, creating a document from a company template, applying the company seal, filling in the document's data.
- Signatures. A signature step with a set order of signers. Each signer gets a task of their own.
- Deadlines. Counted in working days or calendar days.
- Start. Automatic when a document is archived, or manual.
- A new file version mid-process. The process is either cancelled or carries on with the version it is bound to.
Changing a workflow without stopping work
Processes change: a new amount threshold appears, another department takes over an approval. All it takes is a sentence: "In the contracts workflow, add a budget check for contracts over PLN 100,000." The assistant reads the whole workflow, creates a new draft version of it and makes the change. The published version stays untouched until you publish the new one.
Once it is published, new processes follow the new version, while those already under way finish on the version they started with. The previous version is retired. Nobody has to wait for the old workflow to empty.
Convenient, within limits your company sets
- The assistant acts as you. It sees only what you see and works within your permissions.
- Consent for each area separately. Creating, changing and publishing workflow definitions is a separate area that you switch on yourself. You can only do so once an administrator has granted it in your role.
- Your company decides. The starting administrator role does not include access through an assistant. Your company decides who gets it.
- Connected on your word. A new assistant connection waits until you allow it. Disconnecting it takes its access away at once.
- No routes to the outside. Over MCP, the assistant cannot design notifications to arbitrary e-mail addresses, steps for people without a CONTMAN account, or calls to external systems. A person configures those directly in CONTMAN.
- Signing stays with people. The assistant can work on your tasks in processes, but it never signs anything.
Why this makes design easier
The process is described by whoever knows it. A person with permission to manage workflow definitions says, in their own words, how a matter should run. They do not need to remember what the editor calls each type of step or transition.
A first version in one conversation. The draft, the check and the diagram come straight away, and corrections are further sentences, not further meetings.
You choose the assistant. MCP is an open standard through which AI assistants connect to other software. You can connect Claude, Copilot or the agent your company already uses to CONTMAN, for example.
How to get started
- An administrator grants your role the permission for access through an external AI assistant and the workflow definitions area, plus the categories and fields area if you need it.
- You connect your assistant to CONTMAN, then on the MCP connection page in your account menu you allow the connection and tick the areas.
- You describe your first workflow and look at it as a diagram.
Designing workflows with an assistant is available wherever the CONTMAN Workflow module is switched on.
Would you like to see a workflow from your own company take shape from a few sentences? Book a demo and we will show you with your own example.
