Stop Letting AI Agents Run the Whole Workflow

One inbox agent shouldn’t classify, research, score, route, and draft replies in one loose loop. In this video, I build a Mastra workflow that splits sponsor inbox triage into typed steps — bounded model calls where judgment is actually needed, and deterministic guardrails everywhere else. I walk through normalizing and classifying email with explicit schemas, branching from a parent workflow into nested ones, scoring sponsor fit, and inspecting the whole run in Mastra Studio. The point isn’t one giant agent prompt; it’s deciding which parts need model judgment and where the workflow should own control.