Your CRM, inbox, accounting system and drive all work fine on their own. The cost sits in the gaps: someone reads the email, decides what it is, retypes it into the next system, and chases the approval.
Rules-based automation never covered that gap, because the work needs judgement — is this a complaint or an order?, which line items belong on this quote?. An LLM in the loop supplies the judgement; n8n supplies the plumbing, the retries and the audit trail.
The demand signal is unambiguous. n8n's valuation went from $2.5B to $5.2B within months in 2025 on build demand alone, IDC forecasts $1.4T of enterprise AI agent spend by 2027, and intelligent document processing is a $3.2B market growing at ~34% CAGR with SMEs the fastest-growing segment. EY's 2026 India survey found 91% of enterprise buyers rank fast implementation as their top buy-vs-build priority — which is precisely what a fixed-scope package is.