Making an Open-Source CRM AI-Native: laravel/ai in Production
A year ago I wrote about building Relaticle, a free, open-source CRM on Laravel and Filament. Since then, one request kept coming back in every channel: AI.
Last week we shipped it in v3.3 — "Ask Relaticle," an in-app agent that reads and writes the CRM with human approval on every write. This is the post I wish had existed when we started: what it actually takes to put the brand-new first-party laravel/ai package into production, and where the real difficulty lives (spoiler: it's not the prompts).
Why a built-in agent when MCP exists
Relaticle already exposes an MCP server (30 tools over Sanctum with per-team isolation), so Claude or ChatGPT can drive it remotely. That covers the agent-native minority. The built-in chat exists for everyone else — the salesperson who will never open Claude Desktop but will happily press Cmd+J and type "create the company and add the contact."
