From TagPlan AI to SOPX: How a Feature Became a Product

TL;DR

• SOPX started as a feature called TagPlan AI, built inside our field-service app TagPlan, which has served water and wastewater utilities since 2023.
• At Enlit Bilbao (Nov 2025) operators and equipment manufacturers from energy and utility space kept stopping at the AI SOP demo and asking when it would be standalone.
• Twenty customer interviews later, the tribal-knowledge problem proved universal: senior workers retiring, no time to write SOPs, foreign hires stuck shadowing.
• SOPX launched early in 2026 as a separate platform for capturing tribal knowledge, generating SOPs from video or PDF, and sharing work instructions across teams.
• TagPlan is still alive and growing for field operations. Two products, two audiences, one founding team.

TagPlan: where the story starts

TagPlan is a field inspection and work-order app built for teams that maintain assets and facilities in the real world. Since 2023 it has been used by water and wastewater utilities across Europe to run inspections, manage work orders, and keep critical infrastructure compliant. The outcome is boring in the best possible way: clean, drinkable water.

TagPlan gave those utilities two things they did not have before. A structured way to collect field data on every asset, and a baseline to analyze trends, drive compliance, and plan maintenance. Operators stopped filing paper forms and started capturing photos, checklists, and readings on a phone. Supervisors stopped guessing and started reading dashboards.

TagPlan is alive and growing, still focused on field operations. Everything that follows is about a feature that outgrew it, not about a pivot away from it.

The feature that became SOPX

In October 2025 we built the first version of what we called TagPlan AI. The idea was narrow: let a field technician record a process on video and have AI turn the recording into a structured work instruction, step by step, with short video clips and descriptions. We wanted to help TagPlan customers capture the know-how of their senior technicians before those technicians retired.

We had seen the retiring-workforce problem up close inside the water and wastewater industry. A senior operator would announce retirement, and the team would realize too late that decades of setup shortcuts, failure warning signs, and judgment calls had never been written down. Existing tools did not help. Writing SOPs from scratch took hours that no one had.

TagPlan AI was our answer inside that industry. We shipped a demo. Customers used it. It worked.

The Enlit Bilbao moment

In November 2025 we took TagPlan to Enlit in Bilbao, one of the largest energy and utility trade shows in Europe. The plan was to talk about field inspections. What happened was different.

Visitors kept stopping at the screen that showed TagPlan AI. Operations leaders from outside water and wastewater, from manufacturing, energy, and industrial services, asked the same question in different words: “Does this work for our processes too?” Several of them used the word “innovative.” A few asked when it would be available as a standalone product.

That was the moment we stopped thinking about TagPlan AI as a feature. The problem it solved was not limited to field operations. It was a universal problem in any company with physical processes, experienced workers, and no time to document what those workers knew.

Twenty interviews across industries

We followed the trade show with more than twenty customer interviews across industries we had never sold into. Manufacturing. Plastics. Food production. Retail. Restaurants. Hospitality. Laboratories. The story was the same everywhere.

• “Our best operators are retiring and we have no documentation of what they do.”
• “We know we need SOPs. We do not have time to write them.”
• “Onboarding a new hire takes three months because everything is in someone’s head.”
• “We have SOPs, but they are old PDFs nobody reads.”
• “We are hiring foreign workers, but they learn by shadowing because they cannot follow the written SOPs in English.”
• “We run three shifts and each one does the job a little differently.”

Every team we spoke to had some version of the same gap. They had tribal knowledge and no way to capture it. AI had become capable enough to help. No existing tool targeted their operations without a sales call and a long implementation.

Why we spun it out

We could have kept TagPlan AI inside TagPlan and sold it only to field-service teams. We chose not to, for two reasons.

The first reason was scope. TagPlan is a field inspection and work-order platform. Its users are utility technicians, supervisors, and asset managers. Shipping SOP creation, work instructions management, QR-code sharing, team and workspace management, PDF-to-SOP import, and multilingual translation inside TagPlan would have bent the product in a direction its current users did not need.

The second reason was audience. A plastics manufacturer, a restaurant chain, and a hospitality group do not buy a field-inspection app. They do buy a platform dedicated to SOPs and work instructions. The product needed its own identity, pricing, and positioning.

SOPX is that product.

What SOPX is today

SOPX is a platform for capturing and sharing process knowledge. It is broader than the TagPlan AI feature it grew out of.

• Video to SOP. Upload a phone or GoPro recording of a process and AI turns it into a structured SOP with trimmed video clips for every step.
• PDF to SOP. Import an existing PDF and AI extracts the steps, text, and images into an editable digital SOP.
• Manual SOP creation. Build an SOP from scratch with images, carousels, and rich text when video is not the right input.
• Teams and workspaces. Organize SOPs by department, site, or shift with role-based access.
• QR-code sharing. Print a QR code and any operator can open the current version of the SOP on their phone, no login required.
• Multilingual translation. Translate any SOP into 50+ languages in seconds.
• Version history. Every change is logged and every previous version is restorable.

The point is not the feature list. The point is that the platform now covers the full lifecycle of operational knowledge: capture, edit, share, translate, and maintain. TagPlan AI was the capture mechanism. SOPX is the platform around it.

What happened to TagPlan

TagPlan is still running and growing, focused on the field. Water and wastewater utilities continue to use it for inspections, work orders, and asset maintenance. New customers are onboarding every quarter. Those teams’ needs drive the roadmap, not SOPX priorities.

We treat TagPlan and SOPX as two products with two audiences. TagPlan is for teams that need to keep infrastructure running in the field. SOPX is for teams that need to capture and share process knowledge inside their four walls. The products share a founding team and a company, but they serve different jobs.

If you landed here looking for TagPlan, the right place is tagplan.app. If you landed here looking for SOPX, you are in the right place.

What we learned from the spinout

Three lessons from the last twelve months are worth writing down, because they apply to any team sitting on a feature that might be a product.

1. Watch the demo. The Bilbao moment was not a planned focus group. It was the natural reaction of buyers from adjacent industries. If visitors at a trade show keep asking about a specific feature, that feature is trying to become a product.
2. Talk to twenty customers outside your current vertical. If the same problem shows up in twenty conversations across unrelated industries, the problem is universal and the solution has a broader market than you thought.
3. Spin out before you muddy the core product. Forcing SOPX into TagPlan would have confused two different audiences. Keeping them separate lets each product serve its users without compromise.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is TagPlan AI the same as SOPX?

TagPlan AI was the name of an experimental feature inside TagPlan that turned video recordings into structured work instructions. In March 2026 we extracted the feature, expanded it, and launched it as SOPX, a standalone platform for SOPs and work instructions. The underlying video-to-SOP capability is part of SOPX today, along with PDF import, manual SOP creation, teams, workspaces, QR-code sharing, and multilingual translation.

Is TagPlan still available?

Yes. TagPlan is still active and growing. It remains focused on field inspection, work orders, and asset maintenance for teams that maintain infrastructure in the field. Visit tagplan.app for the current version.

Did SOPX replace TagPlan?

No. SOPX is a separate product with a different audience. TagPlan serves field-operations teams in water, wastewater, and similar utilities. SOPX serves any team that needs to capture tribal knowledge and manage SOPs, including manufacturing, food production, retail, restaurants, hospitality, and laboratories.

Why was the feature spun out instead of kept inside TagPlan?

The audiences are different. TagPlan users are field technicians and asset managers. SOPX users are operations managers, plant managers, and training managers across a wide range of industries. Putting SOP management, team workspaces, and public QR sharing inside a field-inspection app would have bent TagPlan away from its core users. Spinning SOPX out let each product evolve on its own roadmap.

When did SOPX launch?

We built the first version of the AI SOP feature inside TagPlan in October 2025. We demoed it at Enlit Bilbao in November 2025 to a strong reception from companies outside field service. Through early 2026 we tested it privately with a small group of companies and a waitlist of more than 30 companies from manufacturing, plastics, retail, restaurants, food, and hospitality. SOPX launched as a public, self-serve product in March 2026.

How can I try SOPX?

Sign up for a free trial at app.sopx.io. No credit card is required. The trial includes 10 AI-generated SOPs, enough to document your most fragile processes and decide whether it fits.