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

Vibe Coding Your Own Business System Is Easy. Keeping It Running Is the Hard Part.

By Shanshan "Sasha" Ma

An AI coding tool can build an order tracker in an afternoon. Keeping it right is the real job. Where the hidden maintenance lives, three questions to ask before you depend on a prototype, and what to build instead.

"The dashboard took an afternoon. Keeping it right took the rest of the quarter."

Monday morning, an operations manager opens the order tracker she built last month with an AI coding tool. It pulls open POs from the ERP, supplier confirmations from a shared inbox, and the expedite list from a spreadsheet. In the demo, it was the first time anyone could see every order in one place.

By Wednesday, it's wrong in three places. A supplier pushed a ship date in an email reply, but the portal still shows the old one. A customer cut the quantity on a phone call. A colleague added a column to the spreadsheet, and the import quietly stopped reading it.

The code is fine. The work itself just showed up. And now she has a second job: keeping the tool in sync with a business that changes every day.

Building the tool was never the hard part

AI has made software genuinely cheap to build. An order tracker, a CRM shaped around how your team sells, an approval tool: what used to take weeks now takes an afternoon. That's a real shift, and small and mid-sized companies should take advantage of it.

But a prototype only has to handle the happy path. A business system has to handle everything else, and the gap shows up in four places.

The exceptions. The supplier's confirmation contradicts the ERP. Which one wins? Is the difference harmless, or does it put a customer promise at risk? Those are business decisions, not interface questions, and every one of them has to become a rule somewhere.

The connections. An integration that works today can be quietly wrong tomorrow. Permissions expire. A request times out after the transaction already went through. Two updates arrive out of order. A dependable system needs validation, retries, duplicate checks, and a visible place where failures land. Without them you get something worse than manual work: a screen that looks authoritative and isn't.

The rules pile up. One customer needs a different approval path. Another needs a special label. AI makes each change easy. Knowing whether change #23 broke change #7 is not.

The builder becomes the support team. The person who understood the workflow and could prompt the tool is now its developer, tester, admin, and help desk. When they're busy, on vacation, or gone, so is the system.

The cost nobody budgets for

Say keeping the tracker honest takes 30 minutes a day: chasing a mismatch, fixing an import, answering "why does it say that?" That's about 10 hours a month, every month, from the one person who understands it. (Illustrative math, but the shape will feel familiar.)

The tool did save time. It also moved a chunk of that time into maintenance and added one more place where information can go stale. The original problem was a person acting as the integration layer between systems. Now that person is the integration layer between the systems and a dashboard.

Should you stop vibe coding? No.

It's excellent for exploring an idea, finding out what your team actually needs, and automating small, bounded tasks. Before a prototype becomes something the business depends on, ask three questions:

Is this workflow really specific to us? If a mature product handles it well, use the product.
Is it bounded? Clear inputs, clear outputs, obvious failure cases: a good candidate. Spans departments, systems, and judgment calls: be careful.
Who owns it after launch? If nobody is accountable for data accuracy, security, and failures, the savings are smaller than they look.

The goal isn't to avoid custom software. It's to avoid becoming a software vendor by accident.

Where the work actually lives

Your ERP, CRM, and accounting system are worth keeping. They hold the record. The trouble is the work between them. A revised date arrives by email; someone has to tie it to an order, check what it means for a customer commitment, decide whether to act, and follow it through. The ERP holds the order. The email holds the change. Nothing holds the chain of work.

That's what a LevelOneAI Operations Workbench does. Instead of another dashboard someone has to feed, it works from the systems and inboxes your team already uses. It pulls the context together for each order or job, flags what's missing or conflicting, and shows what needs to happen next and who owns it. Validation, permissions, and an audit trail are handled the way production software should handle them, and a person still makes the consequential calls.

Keep the systems that work. Let the software follow the work.

Try this week

List the internal tools your team has built in the last year, spreadsheets with macros included. Next to each, write the name of whoever fixes it when it breaks.
Pick the one your team relies on most and ask: if it showed wrong data for a week, would anyone notice before a customer did?
Count how often someone double-checks it against the ERP or an email "just to be sure." That count is your real maintenance cost.

A business system earns its keep by how much work it takes off your plate once the novelty wears off, not by how fast it was built.

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