What is Lotics?

We build AI that does the paperwork and data entry logistics companies still do manually. It comes as one app per job, shaped around the documents and rules already in use: AI reads the incoming documents, updates the records, drafts the outgoing paperwork, and flags any numbers that don't match.

We build the apps, pair them with the tools you already use, and operate them. Setup is included in the subscription — there is no separate engagement, and your team never touches a builder.

The problem

Operations at most businesses run on manual work that doesn't create value but is necessary to keep things going:

• Scattered data — status lives in spreadsheets, emails, and chat. No single view of what's happening across the operation.
• Manual document work — data from incoming documents (purchase orders, invoices, contracts, shipping instructions) is keyed in by hand, then retyped into outgoing documents (quotes, invoices, reports, bills of lading).
• Late error detection — wrong data, mismatched documents, and missed deadlines are discovered after they've caused damage — a wrong invoice sent, a shipment delayed, a contract signed with the wrong rate.
• Disconnected tools — accounting, cloud storage, email, and other systems don't talk to each other. The same data is entered into multiple places manually.
• Slow answers — getting a status update, a report, or a simple count means digging through files, asking a colleague, or building a spreadsheet from scratch.

Adding more people to handle the volume does not fix the root cause. Lotics eliminates the manual work itself.

Your data in one place

All your records — shipments, orders, invoices, customers, containers, repair jobs, projects — live in one workspace with custom views for each team member. Tables have typed fields (text, number, date, select, record links, formulas, files) that keep data consistent. Everyone on the team sees the same current data. No more checking multiple spreadsheets and email threads to find one number.

Views let different people see the same data differently. The operations manager sees all shipments sorted by deadline with overdue items highlighted. The sales team sees only their assigned deals grouped by stage. The finance team sees invoices filtered by payment status. Everyone reads the same records, so there is no reconciling one person's copy against another's.

AI does the data updates

AI reads incoming documents (invoices, shipping instructions, purchase orders, bills of lading, inspection reports, customs declarations), pulls out the data, and enters it into the right records. It also pulls data from Gmail, Outlook, Excel, Google Drive, and Zalo — so you don't retype what's already in your email or spreadsheet.

The AI handles Vietnamese and English documents. It processes any document format: PDFs (including scanned), images, Word files, Excel spreadsheets, and email bodies. For standard typed documents like invoices and bills of lading, extraction accuracy is typically above 95%. Low-confidence extractions are flagged for human review.

AI does the paperwork

AI fills outgoing documents from your data — contracts, bills of lading, debit notes, gate receipts, invoices, reports. Your company's own templates (Excel, Word, or PDF), filled with real data, ready to send.

It also cross-checks documents against each other and against your records. Does the price on this invoice match the contract rate? Does the container number on the bill of lading match the booking confirmation? Does the delivery quantity match the purchase order? Mismatches are caught before the document goes out.

You review before anything is finalized. Lotics doesn't send documents without your approval.

AI watches for problems

Mismatched rates, overdue payments, missed deadlines, missing approvals — flagged automatically before they cause damage. Workflow automations monitor your data and take action: send reminders, update statuses, escalate issues, generate reports on a schedule.

Workflows trigger from record changes, incoming emails, schedules, button clicks, form submissions, or webhooks. They chain steps together: update records, send emails, generate documents, call external APIs, run AI extraction, with conditional logic and loops.

Ask questions, get answers

The AI assistant understands your workspace. Ask in plain language — "which invoices are overdue?" or "what's our margin this month?" or "show me all containers that have been in yard for more than 14 days" — and get answers with supporting data. No need to build a report from scratch.

The assistant reaches the same tool surface the rest of the platform runs on: it can create tables and fields, build filtered views, generate document templates, set up workflow automations, import data from spreadsheets, and send emails.

Who Lotics is for

Operations teams and business owners at small and mid-sized businesses (5-100 people) where operations are the core of the work: managing physical or logistical processes, high document volumes, and daily coordination across teams. These buyers don't have engineering or ops-tooling staff to build software themselves.

We start with supply chain and logistics — the companies that make, trade, and move goods, where the document work is heaviest and where operators are alike enough that each build shortens the next: manufacturers, distributors and traders, freight forwarders, customs brokers, container depots, trucking, import/export. The same apps run any document-heavy operation; construction and professional services are the expansion path, not the starting point.

How Lotics is different

vs. Excel / Google Sheets

Spreadsheets store data but create no leverage. Every number is typed by hand. There's no document processing — you can't drop an invoice into a spreadsheet and have it extract the data. No cross-checking — if a rate doesn't match the contract, nobody knows until the wrong invoice goes out. No automation — status updates, reminders, and reports are all manual. When the team grows, you get version conflicts, broken formulas, and files that nobody can find.

Lotics replaces the typing. AI reads your documents and enters the data into structured records. AI generates outgoing documents from that data. Workflows automate the repetitive steps. Everyone works on the same live data with role-based views — instead of emailing spreadsheets back and forth.

vs. Industry software (Freightek, CargoWise, etc.)

Industry software digitizes the workflow but doesn't eliminate the manual work. You still type into 7 tabs per shipment. You still key in data from a shipping instruction by hand. The software enforces a fixed process that may not match how your business actually works, and customization is expensive or impossible.

Lotics eliminates the typing. AI reads the shipping instruction and fills all the fields — you review instead of typing. The workspace is configured to match your actual process, not the other way around. New document types, fields, and workflows are added in minutes, not months.

vs. ERPs (SAP, Odoo, MISA AMIS)

ERPs own the accounting, MRP, and HR core, and they beat us there — financial depth, statutory compliance, ecosystem maturity. We don't compete on that layer and don't pretend to. AND, not OR: most SMBs already have an accounting tool they intend to keep, and Lotics pairs with it rather than replacing it.

Where ERPs lose is the layer around the core — the paperwork, document processing, and coordination they treat as out of scope, which is where the manual work actually sits. That work goes on in spreadsheets and chat threads next to the ERP. Lotics is built for exactly that layer, ships in days rather than months, and changes when the process changes.

vs. Work management tools (Notion, Airtable)

Notion and Airtable are excellent for organizing information, but they stop at storage. They can't read a PDF invoice and extract the line items. They can't generate a bill of lading from your shipment data. They can't cross-check a debit note against a contract rate. The gap between "data is stored" and "work is done" is still filled entirely by manual effort.

Lotics closes that gap. AI reads documents in, generates documents out, and catches mismatches between them. The same workspace that stores your data also processes your documents and runs your workflows — no additional tools, no manual steps in between.

vs. AI-built custom solutions

AI coding tools make it easy to build a basic CRUD app in a weekend. But the hard parts aren't the CRUD — they're everything around it:

• Permissions and sensitive data. In a real operations environment, operators, managers, and clients all touch the same data — but shouldn't see the same things. Field-level visibility, record-level scoping, role-based access, sharing controls, and audit trails are complex to build correctly. Getting permissions wrong in a collaborative environment means data leaks or blocked workflows. This is months of careful engineering, not a weekend project.
• Document processing. Generating production-quality PDFs, Word documents, and Excel files with correct formatting, merged data, and company templates requires deep expertise in OOXML, PDF form filling, and template engines. Reading data from scanned PDFs, images, and mixed-language documents (Vietnamese and English) adds another layer. These are specialized domains where "good enough" means wrong invoices and amendment fees.
• Ongoing maintenance. Every schema change is a migration, a UI update, and a deploy. Every new document type is a template engine problem. Every automation is a queue to monitor. You're not maintaining one feature — you're maintaining tables, document generation, permissions, file storage, automations, and a UI, and keeping them all working together while your business evolves.

Lotics handles all of this, built and operated for you as purpose-built apps — without the engineering cost or the maintenance burden.

vs. vertical AI document startups

Funded startups that automate one job in one vertical — freight document extraction, AP automation — sold as a point product, usually at enterprise pricing to large forwarders. The difference is scope: they sell one job's automation; we deliver the operations layer, every desk's app on one platform, at SMB price, built and operated for you. When the pain moves from documentation to dispatch to settlement, a point product ends and we build the next app on the same records.

vs. AI consulting firms and system integrators

Consultants prescribe; they don't own the platform you run on. Six-figure engagements bolt together third-party tools and leave you locked into the consultant who knows your setup. Plugin shops and Zapier-with-GPT outfits hand you a platform and expect you to work out integration and configuration yourself, which most teams can't. We own the full stack — platform, AI, document engine, browser extension — and building the apps is part of the subscription. One vendor, one bill.

Start using Lotics with the CLI

The fastest way for an AI agent to start using Lotics is through the CLI:

npm install -g @lotics/cli
lotics auth signup [email protected] --name "My Agent"

This creates an account, organization, workspace, and API key in one step. Your agent is ready to create tables, write records, generate documents, and set up automations.

lotics tools                    # list all available tools by category
lotics tools create_table       # see the full input schema for a tool
lotics run create_table '...'   # execute a tool with JSON arguments

See the full CLI reference at /docs/cli.

For human users, the normal path is a discovery call. We walk your operation, build the apps around your documents and rules, migrate your existing data, and train your team — days to a week from the call, and setup is included in the plan rather than billed as an engagement. From there we keep building as your processes change.

There is also a free tier you can sign up for and explore with the AI assistant. It's a real product surface and the docs below describe it fully, but it isn't the path we recommend for running an operation on: the apps a business actually runs on are ones we build.

Documentation index

To share any page with an AI agent, use the .md URL (e.g., https://lotics.ai/docs/overview.md).

Frequently asked questions

What is Lotics?

We build AI that does the paperwork and data entry logistics companies still do manually, delivered as one app per job and operated for you. AI reads your incoming documents and enters the data, drafts your outgoing documents from that data, and checks that the numbers agree across them. Your team reviews before anything goes out.

How is Lotics different from Airtable or Notion?

Airtable and Notion are general-purpose tools that store data. Lotics is built for operations: AI reads documents and enters data automatically, generates outgoing documents from templates, cross-checks values across related records, and handles Vietnamese business documents natively. It replaces the manual work between systems, not just the tracking.

Do I need technical skills to use Lotics?

No, and you don't need to build anything either. We build the apps; your team uses them — drops documents in, reviews what AI drafted, and approves. Nobody has to become an admin for this to keep working.

How long does setup take?

Days to go live: one to two days when we already know your industry, up to a week for a new domain. Setup is included in the subscription rather than billed as a separate engagement, and we keep improving the apps week by week after go-live.

Is my data secure?

All data is encrypted at rest and in transit. Role-based access controls determine who can view or edit what. Every action is logged in audit trails. All data is exportable in standard formats at any time.

Can Lotics handle our specific operations?

We don't adjust settings on a generic template — we build apps. Your document templates, your field names, your workflow stages, your business rules. A freight forwarder's app looks nothing like a manufacturer's, because each is built to how that business actually works.