Building the Attio AI Agent: From Concept to Reality

In today’s workplace, access to CRM data should be seamless, intelligent, and fast. Manual searches or relying on rigid query structures waste precious time. To solve this, our sales engineer Rakan Zabian built a smart Attio AI Agent that bridges Slack and Attio CRM. This agent lets users ask natural language questions inside Slack and receive relevant CRM information or even update records without leaving the chat.

The Problem We Wanted to Solve with the Attio AI Agent

We needed a way for team members to interact with the Attio CRM without having to manually navigate the platform. Users wanted to:

• Quickly pull up information about accounts, people, or deals.
• Create or update CRM entries through simple prompts.
• Summarize and add meeting notes efficiently.
• Get instant, actionable insights from CRM data with a single prompt. Instead of manually reviewing records, users could simply ask, “What’s the current status of this account?” and receive a comprehensive, up-to-date summary. This includes insights from interaction history, notes, connection strength, associated deals, and other key attributes.

The existing process was too slow, manual, and prone to error. There was a clear need for a conversational, intelligent layer on top of Attio.

Technology Stack and Agent Architecture

The final solution connected Slack, a custom-built Attio Agent, and Attio’s API in a smart workflow. Here’s a high-level flow:

• SlackBot: Captures user queries and responses.
• Attio Agent: Processes the query, reasons about it, and interfaces with Attio.
• Attio: CRM database providing the records and handling updates.

To improve performance and manage complexity, the Attio Agent itself was split into multiple specialized sub-agents:

• Read Agent: Handles reading information from Attio (accounts, people, deals).
• Write Agent: Handles updates or creates notes inside Attio.
• Conversational Agent: Adds natural conversation capabilities, like summarizing meeting transcripts before creating a CRM note.

Each agent utilized function calling techniques with an LLM at the core, using tools like List Records, Get Record, List Notes, Update Record Attribute, and Create Record Note.

Additionally, the Attio Agent system was managed using aiXplain’s Team Agent architecture, as seen in the image below:

• Mentalist: Interpreted the user’s intent.
• Orchestrator: Broke down tasks and delegated them to the appropriate sub-agents.
• Inspector: Reviewed outputs before delivering the final response to the user.

Learn more about our specialized agents

Challenges in Building the Attio AI Agent

• Function call precision: Ensuring the right tool (List vs. Get Record) was selected dynamically based on the query was critical for a smooth user experience.
• Slack integration: Setting up seamless query and response handling between Slack and the Attio Agent required careful backend design.
• Session management: Maintaining session continuity between follow-up queries was a challenge, especially when context needed to persist across multiple interactions. The agent had to track conversation threads and preserve relevant data to deliver coherent, contextual responses.

Conclusion

The Attio Agent project demonstrates how modular AI agent design, combined with smart orchestration, can transform user experiences with enterprise tools. By bringing CRM access into Slack, the team greatly boosted productivity, reduced friction, and made information access as simple as asking a colleague.

There’s room for future optimization—mainly in simplifying the team agent—but the foundation built here is strong, scalable, and a great blueprint for future conversational agents.

This is just the beginning. The roadmap ahead includes evolving the Attio Agent into a full stack of collaborating agents—from engagement analysis and reporting to notification triggers and sales copilots. These agents will work together to automate CRM workflows, extract insights, and enhance the entire business development pipeline. Attio will remain at the heart of this transformation.

Stay tuned!