Getting started with Lotics

Lotics is AI business management software: AI enters data, cross-checks figures, builds reports and drafts documents on the company’s own records. This page covers the two ways to start and what you need.

How it starts

Start with your own AI. Connect Lotics to ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini and give it the setup prompt. It asks what you manage and what you track about it today, reads the files you already have, and builds the workspace from your answers: the tables, the apps and the document templates. It changes the workspace whenever you ask, and it uses no AI Credits.

Or talk to us. The Lotics team can do all of this as an optional full service: we set the workspace up, keep it updated and make every change when your process changes. It costs from $60 a month by plan, with a 3-month minimum. See Pricing.

There is no setup fee. What your plan sizes is the people, the records and the AI Credits that run through it. What is built is yours: ordinary tables and ordinary apps, editable from the moment they exist.

Your team never has to touch a builder. They drop documents in, review what AI drafted, and approve. The workspace stays configurable from inside Lotics, but nobody has to become an admin for it to keep working.

What you need

• A description of how the work runs today, and the documents that come in and go out.
• The files you work with today — the real ones, including the messy scans and each supplier’s differently-shaped spreadsheet.
• Someone to review what the AI builds as it goes.

The free tier

The free tier is sized to evaluate Lotics on your own data. It starts outside the product: you create the account from a terminal (lotics auth signup), connect Lotics to your own AI, and give it the setup prompt. It asks what you manage and builds the tables, the apps and the document templates from your answers. The rest of this documentation describes that surface fully — tables, workflows, documents, the API and CLI are all reachable on it. See Pricing for the limits and the paid plans.

For AI agents: CLI and docs

If you are using your own AI — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or any other model — you can point your agent to the Lotics documentation and CLI for a fully self-guided setup. The CLI tools include comprehensive technical instructions designed for AI consumption, with full input schemas and usage examples for every operation.

curl -fsSL https://lotics.ai/install.sh | bash
lotics auth signup [email protected] --name "My Agent"
lotics tools                    # list all available tools by category
lotics tools set_tables          # see the full input schema for a tool
lotics run set_tables '...'      # execute a tool with JSON arguments

The setup prompt is the one sentence to give an agent connected to Lotics over MCP: it reads the getting started guide from Lotics, asks what you manage, and builds the workspace from the answers.

To give your agent context about Lotics capabilities, share any documentation page using its .md URL (e.g., https://lotics.ai/docs/overview.md). Your agent can read the full documentation and use the CLI to create tables, write records, generate documents, and set up automations without any Lotics-specific integration code.

Those pages describe the product and have one live copy. The exact contract ships inside the CLI your agent installs, and lotics docs prints the copy that matches the version it actually has. Point your agent at the pages to decide what to build; have it run lotics docs once installed, to build it correctly.

The Lotics AI assistant has all of this knowledge built in — it understands your workspace schema, field types, and record relationships natively. External AI agents work in your workspace through the CLI, but need the documentation for context.

See the full CLI reference for installation, authentication, and usage details.

What your AI asks first

The setup starts with understanding your current operation. Your AI asks what you track today, which documents come in and go out, where data enters and leaves the business, and what consumes the most time. It is looking for the specific pain — the spreadsheets that break, the documents that take hours to prepare, the mismatch nobody catches until the invoice is already out.

Based on that, it builds: tables and fields that match your data model, views tailored to what each person needs to see, document templates from your own PDFs and forms, workflow automations for the repetitive steps, and the apps each desk works in. With the Lotics team’s full service, the team does this and walks your staff through it.

Changing it yourself

Everything is reachable through your AI or the built-in Lotics AI. Describe what you need in plain language: “I run a container depot. I need to track containers by number, size, owner, arrival date, and departure date, plus repair jobs and gate-in receipts.” The AI creates the tables, fields, and relationships from that.

It reaches the same tool surface the platform runs on — creating and modifying tables, adding fields of any type, building filtered and sorted views, generating document templates, wiring workflow automations, and importing data from spreadsheets. You refine by conversation: “Add a status field with options: in-yard, under-repair, released”, or “Set up an automation that sends a notification when a repair job is marked complete.”

You can import existing data the same way. For the apps a desk works in, see Apps.

First steps after setup

Invite your team

Lotics uses role-based access control, so you can assign different permissions to different team members. Administrators see everything and can modify the workspace structure. Team members see only the views and data relevant to their role. For example, gate clerks might see only their operational views for recording container movements, while managers see dashboards with summary data and approval queues.

Connect email

Connect your Gmail or Outlook account to enable workflow triggers from incoming messages. Once connected, emails matching specific criteria can automatically create records, update statuses, or kick off multi-step workflows. For example, an email from a shipping line with a container release order can automatically update the container record and notify the gate team.

Set up your first automation

Start with something simple: every weekday morning, send the responsible team member the records that are overdue. As you get comfortable, build more complex workflows with conditional logic, document generation, approval steps, and cross-table updates. The AI assistant can help you design and implement any workflow you can describe.

Import existing data

If you have data in spreadsheets or other systems, import it early so your team starts working with real information from day one.

Importing existing data

Lotics supports several import paths depending on where your data lives.

CSV and Excel files

Upload CSV or Excel files directly through the workspace interface, or ask the AI assistant to handle the import. The AI reads your file, suggests field types based on the data it finds, and maps columns to the appropriate table structure. If your spreadsheet contains data that should be split across multiple tables — for example, customers, orders, and line items all in one sheet — the AI can restructure that into properly linked tables with relationships preserved.

Gmail and Outlook

Connect your Gmail or Outlook account in workspace settings. Lotics can read incoming emails and use them as workflow triggers. You set up rules for how new emails should be processed: which emails to watch for, what records to create or update, and what workflows to trigger. Historical email data does not need to be imported manually. Instead, you configure rules for processing new emails going forward, and the system starts capturing data from that point on.

Other platforms

If you are migrating from another platform like Airtable, Notion, or a custom spreadsheet system, export your data as CSV and import it into Lotics. The AI assistant can help restructure data during import. Single spreadsheets with mixed data get split into properly linked tables. Column names get mapped to appropriate field types. The goal is a clean data model from the start, not a replica of the messy spreadsheet you are leaving behind.

Frequently asked questions

How long does it take to get started with Lotics?

Your own AI builds the workspace from your process and existing files in a single conversation. The variables are how many document templates and workflows the operation needs and how clean the existing data is. There is no setup fee.

Do I need technical skills to set up Lotics?

No. Your AI takes plain language and needs no knowledge of databases, formulas, or workflow logic. If you would rather not set it up, the Lotics team does it as an optional full service. Either way your team never touches a builder: they drop documents in, review what AI drafted, and approve.

Can I import data from my existing spreadsheets?

Yes. Upload CSV or Excel files directly into Lotics. The AI maps columns to fields, detects data types, and can restructure messy spreadsheets into properly linked tables during import. If you have data spread across multiple files or mixed into a single large spreadsheet, the AI handles the reorganization so you start with a clean data model.

What if I need to change the setup after going live?

Tell your AI and it changes the workspace; tables, fields, views, document templates, and automations can all change without disrupting existing data. With the Lotics team’s full service, you tell us and we make the change; changes are included in the monthly fee, with no change fee or re-scoping charge.

Is there a trial?

The free tier is sized to evaluate on, with limits that stop rather than charge. Paid plans are in Pricing: monthly, ex-VAT, with no setup fee.