Perfex AI Staff – AI Assistant, Agents, Knowledge Search & Approvals for Perfex CRM

An AI staff member for Perfex CRM — that waits for your Approve.

Perfex AI Staff reads everything you are allowed to see in Perfex CRM, answers in plain words, drafts the replies and prepares the tasks, notes and reminders. Nothing changes until someone clicks Approve. It runs on the model you choose — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, your own LiteLLM gateway or a local model with Ollama or vLLM — and keeps a full log of what it read, did and cost.

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Why AI Staff

• It does the work, not just the talking: 51 Perfex tools look things up and prepare changes, inside Perfex.
• No change without a person: every write is an approval card, checked again and made exactly once with the approver's permissions. No tool ever emails, texts or messages your customers.
• Your permissions, record by record: "view own" staff only ever get their own records — in answers, search and MCP.
• Any model: a model per feature with a fallback; cloud, gateway or local; keyless local servers supported.
• Every call metered: costs per person, feature and model, budgets that stop or warn, and a complete activity log.
• No core file is modified: standard Perfex module hooks, so Perfex updates stay safe.

Assistant on every page

• "Ask AI Staff" button and slide-out chat on every admin page (Ctrl + /), plus a full-page assistant with history
• Knows the record you are on: customers, contacts, leads, projects, tasks, tickets, invoices, estimates, proposals, contracts, expenses, payments, knowledge base articles
• 37 read tools: search and read customers, contacts, leads, projects, tasks, tickets, invoices, overdue invoices, estimates, proposals, contracts, expenses, payments, credit notes, subscriptions, knowledge base, calendar, reminders, notes, staff, departments, recent activity, pipeline, support and timesheet reports, knowledge search
• 14 tools that propose changes: tasks, task status, assignees, task comments, notes, leads, lead status, lead activity, reminders, calendar events, ticket reply drafts, ticket status, estimate and proposal drafts
• Streaming answers with every step shown, links to the records, answers in each person's language

Approvals and safety

• Approve, edit then approve, or reject each card — in the chat or in the Approvals inbox (filters, bulk approve, history of edits, CSV)
• Exactly-once execution, expiry of waiting cards, failures never retried blindly
• Record content is treated as data, never as instructions; runs started by customer text get fewer tools and never auto-approve
• Optional auto-approve rules, off by default and set by administrators only: low-risk tools that add something inside your team (notes, tasks, reminders, drafts), for everyone or chosen roles, agents only or also the assistant, with daily limits; every auto-approval is in the activity log

AI writing, summaries and ticket triage

• AI menu in every Perfex editor: write from a brief, improve, shorten, lengthen, fix grammar, change tone, translate, reply to a ticket using the knowledge base — editable presets
• AI summary cards on customers, leads, projects, tickets and contracts
• Ticket triage: department, priority, service, tags, sentiment, language, helpful articles and a draft reply, applied through one approval card
• Registers as a Perfex AI provider (Perfex 3.3+): ticket summary, reply suggestion and text enhance on your model, with your budgets

Agents

• Built in: Morning Briefing for every person, Stale Lead Nudges, Overdue Invoice Chaser (drafts only)
• Custom agents builder: plain-language instructions, tool picks, run-as staff member, schedules or events (new lead, new ticket, customer reply, task completed, invoice overdue, contract ending), approval policy, limits and a monthly budget
• Test runs that change nothing, run history with transcripts, notifications and email reports

Knowledge search (RAG)

• Records, the knowledge base, predefined replies and attached files (PDF, DOCX, ODT, TXT, MD, CSV, HTML) indexed in your own database
• Search by meaning and keywords; MariaDB vectors when available; incremental indexing on the Perfex cron
• Every result checked against its record for the person asking; answers cite their sources

Governance

• Usage and costs by person, feature, model and day; provider-reported costs or an editable price table; CSV exports
• Budgets per day or month for everyone, a role, a person, a feature or an agent — stop or warn, with early warnings
• Activity log of reads, proposals, decisions, settings and key changes, MCP calls and agent runs
• Personal data hidden before sending (emails, phones, IBANs, cards, your own patterns) and restored in answers; fields that are never sent; local-only mode; retention settings

Customer portal, website chat and MCP

• Portal assistant: each contact's own invoices, quotes, projects and tickets plus help articles; ticket and callback forms the contact submits; limits per contact and customer
• Website chat widget: one script tag; answers from public knowledge base articles only; contact form to a lead; hand-off to a ticket or lead; allowed websites, signed visitor tokens, rate limits, visitor blocking
• MCP server: connect Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and other MCP clients with personal tokens (read-only or read-and-propose, tool picks, expiry, rate limits); changes still wait for approval

More

• AI fields: Perfex custom fields filled by AI on create, update or by hand, reviewed before saving
• "Ask to filter" on Perfex lists: a sentence becomes the list's own filters; no record data is sent
• Works with Perfex Brain Pro and Perfex Cash & Capacity (sold separately): dashboard figures, margins, receivables, client grades and capacity as tools; bookings and payment follow-ups as approval cards

Providers

• OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini
• Any OpenAI-compatible server: LiteLLM, Ollama, vLLM, LM Studio, OpenRouter, Groq, Mistral and more
• Keys encrypted and write-only; private-network servers only after an administrator allows them

Security & permissions

• The model works only through tools — never SQL or raw tables
• Seven permission groups: Assistant, Approvals, Agents, Knowledge, Activity, Usage, Settings
• Safe outgoing requests: https or approved local addresses, pinned DNS, no redirects, reserved ranges refused
• POST + CSRF on every change; public endpoints protected by origin checks, signed or hashed tokens and rate limits
• Perfex SaaS ready: per-tenant data, keys, secrets and cron

What you get

• The installable module zip
• Offline HTML documentation, changelog and third-party licences
• Licence for one Perfex CRM installation
• Six months of support and free updates

Requirements

• Perfex CRM 3.0 or newer (tested on 3.4.1); Perfex's own AI features use AI Staff from Perfex 3.3
• PHP 8.1 or newer with cURL (zip extension to read Word/OpenDocument files)
• Perfex cron job configured (agents, indexing, triage, AI fields, clean-up)
• An API key from an AI provider, or a self-hosted model (Ollama, vLLM, LM Studio) or a LiteLLM gateway