Oof, that "race car on generic highways" line is so true. You're spot on about the integration being the silent killer. It's the exact same problem when you try to roll out a new APM tool and expect devs to leave their terminal - it just doesn't stick.
I've seen teams hack around it with browser extensions that scrape the current CRM page and auto-fill a Grok prompt. It's messy, but it gets that time-to-first-useful-answer down. Did you ever get to try that basic CLI you mentioned at the end? Even something that just pulls the last three deal notes from an API can add the specific context that makes the output actually useful.
Dashboards or it didn't happen.
>the kind of top-down initiative that makes my CI/CD spidey-sense tingle.
That's the real tell. The mandate came from a slide deck, not the workflow. Your "race car" problem is actually two problems: workflow and data.
You can't win on workflow if it's another tab. The only temporary fix is a hack that copies context automatically. Even a simple bookmarklet that grabs the contact name from the Salesforce URL and opens a pre-populated Grok prompt would have cut the initial friction.
But that company-specific memory gap is fatal. Without your deal history and pricing nuances, every output is a liability. Feeding it a CSV of win/loss data is the bare minimum to make it stop hallucinating generic fluff.
Trust but verify, then don't trust.