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

Nobody Owns the Complete Operational State. So Somebody Becomes the Human Router.

By Shanshan "Sasha" Ma

Your CRM knows the customer. Your ERP knows the transaction. Engineering knows the design. Supply chain knows materials. Production knows capacity. Email, Excel, and Teams hold the latest exceptions. Nobody owns the complete operational state — so somebody becomes the human router. Why that gap exists, why the usual fixes miss it, and what has to exist instead.

Six systems. Each one competent. Each one correct inside its own walls.

The CRM knows the customer. It knows the account, the contacts, the deal history, the last conversation.

The ERP knows the transaction. It knows the order, the commitment date, the invoice, what was actually shipped.

Engineering knows the design. It knows the revision, the bill of materials, what changed and when it takes effect.

Supply chain knows materials. It knows what's on hand, what's inbound, what's short, what it costs to expedite.

Production knows capacity. It knows the schedule, the constraints, which line can take the work and which one can't.

Email, Excel, and Teams contain the latest exceptions. The real status — the one that changed this morning — lives in a thread, a spreadsheet someone rebuilt on Tuesday, and a DM.

And the human is sitting in the middle.

Nobody owns the complete operational state

Every one of those systems is a specialist. That's the point of them, and they're good at it. But none of them was designed to hold the whole picture, and no one was ever assigned to own it.

So look at the org chart and find the gap. There's a customer, a transaction, a design, a material position, a capacity constraint, and a live exception — and there is no place where those six facts sit together as one state of the world.

The gap doesn't stay empty. Someone fills it.

So somebody becomes the human router

That person is not doing their job badly. They're doing a job nobody designed: holding the operational state in their head, knowing which system to check for which fragment, translating between vocabularies that don't match, and chasing the one fact that decides everything.

You can recognize the router by the symptoms:

Nothing moves while they're on vacation.
New hires are told to "ask Dana" — and Dana is not in the process doc.
The same question gets answered three different ways depending on who you ask.
Every expedite, every escalation, every "can we still make the date?" runs through one desk.
The status of a real order exists in a thread, not in a system.

They are the integration bus for a company that never bought one. And because it's a person, every decision pays a latency tax — the work waits until the router is free.

This isn't a skills problem or an effort problem. It's an architecture problem wearing a person's name.

Why the usual fixes miss

Buy another system. Now there are seven places the truth lives, and the router has one more tab to check. The gap gets wider, not narrower.

Run an integration project. Integrations move data between systems. They don't own the operational state, and they don't carry an exception to a decision. You get cleaner records and the same human router.

Automate the routing. You've now automated the workaround. Faster handoffs, same gap — and a much harder thing to remove later.

Build a dashboard. A dashboard shows you the state as of an hour ago. It's read-only. It cannot chase the supplier, hold the exception, or move the work forward. The router still has to do all of that by hand.

None of these are stupid moves. They're just all aimed at the systems, when the thing that's actually missing is an owner for the state between them.

What has to exist instead

One place that assembles the operational state from all six sources, holds the exception as a work item, and puts the decision in front of the right person with the context already gathered.

Not a system of record. A system of work — an Operations Workbench that sits beside the systems you already run, reads from them, and owns the part nobody owns today.

Where LevelOneAI fits

A LevelOneAI Operations Workbench takes the routing out of one workflow: the state assembled from the systems you already run, each exception held as a work item, and the decision in front of the right person with the context already gathered. It stays open until it's resolved, and nothing changes in your systems without approval.

Start a 30-day free trial of Operations Workbench Starter on your own work, or see a Workbench demo.

What changes

The router goes back to being a buyer, a planner, a production manager — someone whose judgment is the scarce input, not someone who spends the day fetching facts that should already be in one place.

And the measure isn't "did we ship software." It's hours given back, and a team that does the job the business needs rather than the job of holding its systems together.

The human was never the problem. The gap was.

If you can name the person in your company who currently owns the complete operational state, you've just found the workflow worth fixing first.

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