A financial services company uses an AEM Forms workflow to process loan applications. The workflow includes a custom step that invokes the Document Services API to merge user data with an XDP template, generating a final contract PDF. During peak hours, the workflow engine becomes sluggish, and logs indicate high CPU usage. Analysis reveals that the Document Services API call is synchronous and resource-intensive. Which approach is the most effective for mitigating the performance impact of this step on the main workflow thread?