- Claim 1
The costly work sits between systems, not inside them.
- Claim 2
That seam won't close on its own. No single vendor owns the gap between its product and someone else's.
- Claim 3
The screen is the one interface every system already has.
- Claim 4
Reach without control is a liability where money moves.
- Claim 5
The person who does the work is the only one who knows it, so they must be able to build and change the agent.
The thesis in five claims
Each claim shaped the product. If any were false, LaunchAI would look different.
The swivel chair
Every mid-market back office has one. The ERP went live, the integration budget ran out, and the vendor portal, the scanned invoice, and the spreadsheet stayed outside. So a person became the integration: read on one screen, type on another, check a third.
The cost isn't only hours. A transposed digit surfaces at audit. The one person who knows month-end gives notice, and the process leaves with them.
Our Process Atlas maps 1,554 of these recurring processes across manufacturing, construction, and property management Process Atlas →.
Why the first answers stopped short
Three kinds of automation reached the back office first. Each still does its part well. Each leaves a gap.
| Approach | What it does well | Where it stops |
|---|---|---|
| RPA | Replays recorded clicks | A moved field breaks it, and a developer has to fix it |
| Integration platforms | Connects systems that publish APIs | The portal, the PDF, and the desktop ERP |
| General computer-use models | Sees and clicks | No exact rules, no designed review step, no evidence per action |
The full side-by-side is in our decision guide.
Six principles
Each principle rules something out.
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Atomicity
Work is split into the smallest checkable pieces.
What it rules out
Rules out the one long instruction that fails somewhere in the middle with no record of where.
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Universality
Use an API where one exists, the screen where it doesn't, an exact rule where correctness matters, a person where approval is required.
What it rules out
The workflow picks the tool, never the other way around.
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Vision first
A missing connector no longer decides what can be automated.
What it rules out
Vision is slower per step than an API. We trade that latency for coverage on purpose.
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Repeatability
No prompts as the program.
What it rules out
A spoken rule becomes an exact rule, a lookup becomes a table, so tomorrow's run reads tomorrow's invoice the same way.
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Retraceability
Pick any number the agent posted and trace it back to the pixels it was read from.
-
Manage
The process owner changes one step, rule, or table row, without a developer or a rebuild.
What it rules out
Every change is a version, and a second person signs before it runs.
Ask any vendor these questions
The principles double as a checklist for any automation tool, including ours.
Vendor checklist
What we believe about people and automation
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Carrying isn't the job. Deciding is.
Keying a total from a PDF is carrying. Judging whether a price variance is acceptable is the job. The agent carries, rules take the decisions policy already made, and people take the rest.
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An agent should ask, not guess.
When two targets match, it doesn't pick one. When a review is waiting, the run waits. It never times out and proceeds.
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People must stay in practice.
Automating the routine can leave people with only the hardest cases and none of the daily practice. So people stay in the work: they can take over mid-run, see evidence instead of summaries, and re-show a step when a screen changes.
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Accountability stays with named people.
Every approval carries a name and a time. Reversing a posting is a person's call in the ERP, never the agent's.
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The number that matters is hours returned.
What you do with them is your call.
Who it's for
Manufacturers, contractors, and property managers with roughly 50 to 1,000 employees, running ERPs like Epicor, SyteLine, Vista, Sage Intacct, or Yardi, with portals and paper around them
Process owners (AP clerks, billing clerks, property accountants, buyers) who know the job and want to stop re-keying it
Controllers and CFOs who won't trust automation without evidence and a veto
Lean IT teams that need least privilege and no new integration to maintain
ERP consultants closing the gaps a go-live left behind
When a narrower tool might cost less
Some jobs sit entirely inside one tool's sweet spot. Here's the honest version.
| If your job is... | A narrower tool may fit | What LaunchAI adds |
|---|---|---|
| All APIs, no portals or documents | Integration platforms (Zapier, Make, n8n, Workato) | The portal, the PDF, and the desktop ERP when the job grows one |
| Your engineers building their own agent product | Developer frameworks (LangGraph, CrewAI, Google ADK, OpenAI Agents SDK) | Back-office procedures with no build team required |
| Huge volumes run by an automation center of excellence | Enterprise RPA | Reach into screens that break selectors, owned by the person who does the work |
| A one-off personal errand | A general AI assistant | When it recurs, a governed procedure with rules, review, and evidence |
When every system has a clean API, LaunchAI steps can call those APIs too. One catalog of agents beats two tools with two audit trails.
Questions
Why not wait for ERP vendors to add agents?
They are adding them. But those agents work inside their own vendor's app. The re-keying happens between apps, in the gap no single vendor owns.
Why the mid-market?
An enterprise has developers to maintain its bots. A 150-person company has a controller, an AP clerk, and maybe one IT generalist. The tool has to be built and owned by the people who already do the work.
When speed and verification conflict, which wins?
Verification. Every action is checked before the next one starts. We buy speed back with trained app maps, exact rules that need no model, and more machines when the queue grows.
Why run on the desktop instead of a vendor's cloud?
Because the work already lives there: the open sessions, the trusted office network, the installed ERP.
What does LaunchAI ask of the people who do the work?
Time to describe and show the first agent, attention during the first supervised runs, and their judgment on what reaches their review queue.
See it on your own workflow Demo →.
More in Mission
No prompts. No babysitting. No Integrations.