# Evaluating LLM Trade-offs for Enterprise Automation: Lessons from Workflow Generation in a Production Enterprise Platform

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03311 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.03311/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 8 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [Gorilla: Large Language Model Connected with Massive APIs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15334/) (2023)
- [FrugalGPT: How to Use Large Language Models While Reducing Cost and Improving Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05176/) (2023)
- [Grammar-Constrained Decoding for Structured NLP Tasks without Finetuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13971/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Enterprise compliance management requires rapid adaptation to evolving regulatory frameworks (e.g., DORA, AI RMF, FedRAMP) and tight remediation SLAs. Traditional static orchestrators often fail in hybrid cloud environments where event-driven assessments demand that automation code adapt to runtime context in seconds. This paper presents lessons learned from evaluating six large language models for AI-driven workflow generation in a production enterprise platform, benchmarked across 29 real-world IT automation scenarios, two generation pipeline architectures, and eight independent runs per prompt-model-pipeline configuration (2,784 runs total). Our initial pipeline used monolithic workflow generation, achieving 31.5-82.8% structural success rates (JSON schema validity and correct UI rendering), with most models struggling on complex JSON generation. We developed a redesigned piecewise pipeline that decomposes workflow construction into variable scaffolding, base block assembly, and nested block generation, raising structural success to 74.1-97.8% across all models. We analyze production tradeoffs including cost (USD 0.008-0.20 per workflow), latency (under 50s for interactive use), and model selection. Piecewise decomposition enables smaller models (e.g., mistral-small at 95.7% structural success and USD 0.01 per workflow) to reach production viability, removing dependency on expensive frontier models. While mistral-medium-2505 and gpt-oss-120b achieved the highest structural success (96.1% and 97.8%), mistral-medium-2505 carries a 19x cost premium versus mistral-small. Our deployment lessons highlight the need to separate structural validity from semantic correctness (logical fulfillment of user intent) and provide a solution for model-agnostic, scalable automation in cloud engineering.