Most teams start with one person on Operations Workbench Starter, free for 30 days. Add LevelOneAI in Claude or ChatGPT, connect your email and add any exports you have, such as open POs or a schedule. Starter shows which changes put orders at risk, with the evidence, and tracks each one to a close. When the whole team needs it, with live ERP data, approvals and write-back, that's the Operations Workbench.

How do Starter, the Workbench and the Operations Engine fit together?

The LevelOneAI Operations Engine does the work: it treats each order, PO or job as one record (Work), compares what changed with what was promised (Context), works out what it affects and who needs to decide (Decision), and assigns, drafts and tracks the next step (Action), until it's resolved. Starter runs the engine on one person's email and the documents they add. A Workbench runs it across a whole team's email, ERP and CRM for one workflow, with live data, approvals and write-back.

Is there a free trial?

Yes. Operations Workbench Starter is free for 30 days, and you don't need a card. After that it's $199/month or $1,990/year (two months free), for 1 user and 1 mailbox. If you don't continue, your account becomes read-only and your data is deleted 30 days later.

What do I need to use Starter?

A paid Claude or ChatGPT plan (the free tiers don't include the access it needs) and a Gmail or Outlook mailbox. For work email, a business or enterprise plan from that provider is recommended. Documents are optional: exports from any ERP or spreadsheet work.

What's the difference between Starter and the Operations Workbench?

Starter works from one person's email and the exports they add, and you set it up yourself in minutes. It's built to show the value on your own work. The Operations Workbench connects live to your ERP and planning data, runs on its own, puts the whole team in one queue, and adds approvals, drafted follow-ups and write-back. Starter fees paid in the 6 months before you buy a Workbench are credited toward its setup.

Which documents should I add to Starter?

Whatever you have, or none. It works on email from the first run, and tells you which document would sharpen the results most. Typical ones are an open-PO export, a production schedule, open sales orders or an AR aging report. It keeps only the fields it needs from them, encrypted, never the files.

It says what it doesn't know. Each fact shows its source and when it arrived. When an email could match more than one order, it asks instead of guessing, and when a document is missing it says "impact not assessed" rather than "no impact." Your team makes the call.

How does billing work?

Starter is billed monthly or annually by card, with a receipt emailed for every payment and invoices on your billing page. Cancel anytime. A Workbench is a one-time setup fee, invoiced on the schedule in your quote, plus an annual platform fee that starts at go-live.

When does my team need a Workbench?

When the work depends on more than one person's inbox: the evidence sits in your ERP, CRM or planning data, several people need to see the same item, and someone has to make sure it closes. A Workbench gives the team one queue, one record per item, approvals and a team view.

What's built, and what do you configure for us?

The Operations Engine, the work queue, the work record, approvals, follow-up tracking and the team view are built. For each Workbench we configure the connections to your systems, the rules that decide what counts as an exception, who owns what, what closes an item, and whether approved changes are written back. Which systems it connects to, and how, is worked out during setup.

Operations Workbench Starter is free for 30 days, then $199/month or $1,990/year. An Operations Workbench is a one-time setup fee, from $20,000 per workflow, plus an annual platform fee that's included in your quote. There's no ongoing services fee: once it's live, your team runs it, and our help is optional. The platform fee covers hosting, AI processing, connector updates and improvements to the Operations Engine. It starts at go-live, and in the first year you can cancel 90 days after go-live if the agreed measures aren't met. The payback calculator compares the setup fee with what the delay costs you each year. The next Workbench reuses the connections you already have, so it costs less to set up. See Pricing for what's included.

How long does setup take?

Starter works the same day. A Workbench typically goes live in 6 to 12 weeks, depending on how many systems it connects and how complex the rules are. We agree the baseline and what success looks like before setup starts.

What happens to our ERP and CRM?

They stay where they are and keep the master data. A Workbench reads from them. Write-back is optional: whether approved updates go back, and to which systems, is decided during setup. Nothing changes in your systems without approval.

What data does LevelOneAI keep?

It's designed to keep only what it needs to run the work, such as references to the source, the facts it extracted (a date, a quantity, a price), status, owners and decisions. For a Workbench, exactly what's stored is agreed with you during setup. Starter never stores email: it keeps short labels, plus the fields it needs from documents you add, encrypted.

What will this ask of our IT team?

Starter needs no IT: you connect your own email in Claude or ChatGPT, and there's a one-page security summary to share with IT. A Workbench needs read-only access to the systems the workflow uses, granted once by whoever administers them, and typically a few hours of IT time during setup. Nothing is installed, and nothing changes in your systems without approval. See Growing Businesses if you don't have an IT department, or Enterprises for how we fit an IT review.

What happens when it isn't sure, or data is missing?

If an email could belong to more than one order or PO, it shows the candidates with their evidence and asks a person to confirm, instead of guessing. If a source is unavailable or a record can't be found, the item is marked incomplete, so your team knows the picture isn't complete. Every fact is labeled confirmed, conflicting, inferred or unknown.

Is this a product or a consulting engagement?

A product. The Operations Engine, the work queue, the work record and approvals are built. Setup configures them to your systems, rules and owners for one workflow. You pay a one-time setup fee and an annual platform fee. There's no ongoing services fee, so your team runs it without us.

Do you have a SOC 2 report?

No SOC 2 report yet. We'll walk your security team through the data flow and complete your security questionnaire on request.

What happens to our data if we stop?

You can export your work history and audit trail. With Starter, your data is deleted 30 days after you cancel or after a trial ends without a paid plan. Your ERP and CRM keep their own data, because they were the record all along.

That's decided with you during scoping, based on your security and IT requirements.

To read the messy information around a piece of work (the email, the attachment, the system field), match it to the right order or PO, compare it with what was promised, and recommend the next step. Every fact is labeled confirmed, conflicting, inferred or unknown, with its source. Your people make the call, and nothing changes in a system without approval.

Why can't we just add an AI agent?

You can, and it will do the steps. What an agent won't do on its own is keep one record of each order across email and your systems, notice a change nobody asked about, know which promise it breaks, and keep the issue open until it's resolved. That's what you'd have to build and maintain around it. LevelOneAI already does that, and works alongside the agents you use. See Why AI Agents Fail under Resources.

How is this different from process mining?

Process mining reads event logs from your ERP or CRM, so it can't see what happens in email, spreadsheets and phone calls, which is where most exceptions start. It also tells you where the process breaks; it doesn't work each exception to a close. A Workbench does.

Why not wait for our ERP or CRM vendor to add AI?

Use it. ERP AI is getting good at work inside the ERP, such as reading a supplier's email and proposing the PO change. A Workbench is for what happens next, across systems: which jobs and customer orders the change puts at risk, what the planner's sheet says, who has to approve, and whether it was actually resolved. If the problem starts and ends inside your ERP, its own AI may be all you need.

When is our ERP's own AI enough?

When the problem starts and ends inside the ERP, updating the record is the whole job, and everything the decision needs is already there. Add a Workbench when the change matters because of what it affects elsewhere (jobs, customer orders, invoices), when the numbers people trust live in a spreadsheet or portal, when resolving it takes several people and an approval, or when someone has to confirm it was actually resolved.

What if our workflow changes?

Rules, owners, thresholds and closing conditions are configuration, so they can be updated as your process changes, without a new project.

What if our team doesn't adopt it?

A Workbench brings the context to each piece of work instead of asking people to go and look for it, and it fits around the systems they already use. We also agree the measures up front, so you can see whether it's working.

All insights

General

Five Decisions That Decide Whether Your Software Supports the Work

By Shanshan "Sasha" Ma

Most companies don't have a systems problem. They have five decisions nobody made deliberately — and a lot of work still landing on people. A sequence for operations leaders who already own the software.

After years of investing in ERP, CRM, and the systems that were supposed to make the business run, many companies still run on spreadsheets, email threads, and people chasing updates.

That is rarely a failure of the software. The software is usually working as designed.

What's missing is a layer of decisions nobody owns: how work moves between the systems, and who is responsible when it doesn't. Those decisions get made anyway — a new tool here, a workaround there, a spreadsheet that quietly becomes infrastructure. They just get made by default.

Five decisions, made deliberately, change that.

A sequence, not a shopping list

These build on each other. Skip one and the next costs more than it should. Each is written as a fork, because in practice most teams take the default answer without noticing there was a choice.

1. Start with the work, not the software

The default: a platform, a module, or an AI pilot enters the conversation first, and the team works backward to find a use case that justifies it.

The decision: start with a piece of work the business depends on and follow it. One quote to a delivered order. One supplier commitment to a production run. One claim to a resolution. Not the process diagram — the actual path, including the parts that only exist in someone's inbox.

Where to look:

Where do people spend hours chasing updates, reconciling conflicting information, or working out what needs to happen next?
Where does the same information get entered twice because two systems don't talk?
Where does answering one question require three tabs and a phone call?

That path is your requirement. Platform, build, buy, AI — all of it is downstream of this step. Teams that get the order wrong audit the software they own and ask what's missing. Teams that get it right audit the work and ask what's unsupported. Those two questions produce different answers and very different invoices.

2. Map the work to the business outcome

The default: the friction gets described as annoyance. We're always chasing. Nobody knows what's going on. Annoyance is real, and it is also the first thing to get deprioritized when the quarter gets tight.

The decision: attach the friction to something the business already measures.

A supplier delay noticed two days late disrupts a production run and pushes a delivery date.
A missed handoff delays an order, and the customer notices before you do.
Hours spent reconciling data leave fewer hours for decisions that actually move revenue.

Here is the test: can you say what one unhandled exception costs? Not an average across thousands — one. If you can't put a number on a single instance, you can't size a fix, you can't get it funded, and you can't prove it worked after the fact.

The point isn't a business case document. It's knowing where to focus, and how you'll measure the value when the work stops landing on people.

3. Adapt the software to the work — without confusing that with customizing it

The default: two answers on the table. Customize the ERP until it fits, or retrain people until they fit the ERP. Both are legitimate. Both send a bill that arrives years later.

The decision: treat that as a false choice, and look for a third option — supporting the work across the systems you already run, so the fit problem stops being a software question.

The short version of the two costs: customization freezes your process at the day it was built and makes every future upgrade more expensive; retraining quietly removes the judgment your team applies at the exceptions, which is often the reason customers buy from you. I've written about both at length in Customize the software, or retrain your people.

Standard processes make sense where they support how the business actually operates. The problem starts where software forces people into workarounds — and the workarounds multiply. Another spreadsheet, another manual update, another coordination meeting.

The answer isn't always more customization or another system. It's a place for the work that doesn't fit inside any one of them. Not a new system of record — a layer that holds the state of a piece of work while it is still moving.

4. Connect the context, not just the data

The default: integration. Pipe a field out of the ERP into the CRM, sync the ticket to the deal, and call it connected.

The decision: connect what the information means for the person who has to act on it.

Knowing a purchase order is late is data. Knowing which customer order it affects, what was promised, whether production needs rescheduling, and who has to move first — that's context. Context is what a decision actually needs.

This is the difference between two questions that sound identical in a planning meeting and are nothing alike in practice:

What happened? Data integration answers this.
What does it mean, and what do I do next? This is the one people are really asking, and in most companies it is still answered by a person assembling the answer by hand.

Most teams have built the first one. The second one has been quietly outsourced to whoever is willing to open the most tabs.

5. Close the loop — don't stop at the alert

The default: notification. A dashboard turns red, a task gets created, a message lands in a channel. Everyone feels informed, and the thing is still broken.

The decision: make resolution the unit of work, not the alert.

An exception is closed when someone understands the situation, the right people are coordinated, a decision is made, and someone verifies the outcome. An alert doesn't do any of that. A task doesn't guarantee follow-through either — it moves the reminder, not the work.

Alerts are cheap to build and easy to demo. Follow-through is the expensive part, and it's where all the value sits. If your system can create a task but can't tell you whether the issue was actually resolved, you've automated the easy half and left the hard half with your team.

What the five decisions have in common

Every one of them moves attention from the stack to the work.

None of them requires replacing a system. None of them depends on a particular vendor. Together they turn a vague, widely felt sense that "the systems don't work" into a set of specific things you can fix — and a way to know whether the fix held.

That's a better position than another platform evaluation. It's also a shorter one.

Where LevelOneAI fits

We don't ask you to replace your existing systems, and we don't ask your people to adopt yet another workflow to get the value.

We connect fragmented information across the systems you already run, so the work that falls between them — the changed date, the conflicting number, the exception nobody owns — stays visible and keeps moving until it's resolved.

Because the next step in business software isn't more AI or more automation. It's software that works around the actual work of running a business.

Where does work still fall between the systems in your business? Tell us the workflow that keeps breaking, and we'll tell you honestly whether this is a problem worth solving — and how we'd approach it.

Talk to us