Before diving deeper into ShingleAI, it helps to understand the key concepts that shape how the platform works. This section covers the building blocks of ShingleAI: how data is organized, how communication flows, how AI does work for you, and how it all gets paid for.Documentation Index
Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.shingleai.com/llms.txt
Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
Key Concepts
Organizations
Multi-tenancy, members, and access
Contacts & Customers
People you communicate with and people who buy from you
Businesses
Multiple businesses inside one organization
Messages & Threads
Email, SMS, and other channels in one inbox
Tasks
Work tracking and the Eisenhower priority matrix
Files & Knowledge
File ingestion, RAG indexing, and retrieval
Agents
Conversational AI workers — and how they differ from automations
Automations
Event-triggered AI workflows
Credits & Billing
Tiers, consumables, overage rates, and credits
How It All Fits Together
ShingleAI is built around a simple hierarchy: Organizations are the top-level container. Everything else belongs to an organization and is isolated from other organizations. Members are users with access to the organization. Each member has a role that determines their permissions. Businesses are the commercial entities you run inside the organization. Most accounts have one; agencies and holding companies often have several. Each business has its own profile, offerings, locations, and Stripe connection. Email Addresses and Phone Numbers are the connected channels ShingleAI uses to send and receive communications — Google or Microsoft accounts for email, Telnyx numbers for SMS and voice. Contacts represent the individuals you communicate with. Customers are contacts you have a commercial relationship with. Messages are the communications themselves, grouped into threads. Tasks are units of work — created by you, by automations, or by agents — and surface on your home page through the Eisenhower priority matrix. Files are documents you upload. Once indexed, they become a knowledge base that agents can search via hybrid retrieval (vector + keyword). Agents are conversational AI workers you chat with: configured persona, tool access, conversation history. Automations are event-triggered workflows that run on their own. Most users mix them up at first — see the Agents page for when to reach for which. Credits are how usage on top of your plan is metered and billed. They don’t appear in the hierarchy because they’re not data — they’re the meter that runs over everything.Start Learning
If you’re new, read these in order:Organizations
Start here — how access and data isolation works
Contacts & Customers
The people side of the platform
Agents vs. Automations
The most important distinction in ShingleAI
Credits & Billing
How tiers, consumables, and overages work