Introducing Otto by GridLink

Today we're launching Otto: an autonomous charging reliability service by GridLink. Otto detects, diagnoses, fixes, and escalates issues that operators handle by hand today, across the chargers, software, and ticketing they already run.

We built it the slow way. For the past year, although it wasn't the core part of our software business, we've also been running a network operations center for chargers. That meant watching live sessions, fielding driver complaints, and coordinating with charger and vehicle engineers when something misbehaved.

The surprising part was not that charging operations required people. It was how much of the work was repeatable.

A session would fail to start. An operator would pull the recent Open Charge Point Protocol (OCPP) messages, check the handshake, and run the known recovery. A charger would derate. Someone had to decide whether the issue was the vehicle, the charger, the site configuration, or the charging station management system (CSMS). A fault would fire. The code alone rarely said enough.

That's playbook work, and a lot of it can be automated. Otto is what we built to run those playbooks at scale.

What We Saw Running Charging Operations

Under a grant from the Michigan Office of Future Mobility and Electrification, we spent the past year running and building this stack in production, across a wide variety of vehicle and charger setups.

Many of these failures only surface if a human reads the OCPP stream line by line, looking for the place where the story stops making sense. To anyone else, the traffic reads as healthy.

Reported network uptime sits at 95–99% [1]. Depending on the studies you read, first-try session success is closer to 86% [2][3], falling below 70% by year three [4]. More than 90% of those failures are software and connectivity, not broken hardware [5].

One in seven sessions fails on the first try. More than 80% of those failures are software, not hardware. Most operators are still handling them by hand.

In our own NOC work with Otto this year, the share resolved without dispatching a technician has trended higher still.

What Otto Does

Otto reads from the chargers, software, telemetry, and ticketing systems operators already use, and works five surfaces:

Detect. Watch the OCPP stream for failed starts, stale telemetry, ambiguous fault codes, derates, and the patterns operators would otherwise have to catch by hand.

Diagnose. Classify the failure against charger model, firmware, vehicle, and site context. Pull the messages that prove it.

Act. Run approved recovery: retries, resets, configuration checks, ticket updates, multi-step remediations.

Escalate. Route the right evidence to the right person when automation shouldn't act alone. A technician, vendor engineer, or internal operator shouldn't have to reconstruct the failure from scratch.

Analyze. Surface recurring failure modes, underutilized chargers, repeated fault classes, and operational patterns before they become issues operators stop questioning.

Where Otto Fits

Otto is a new category of software for EV charging. The CSMS manages chargers. Otto automates the operational work around them; it sits alongside the CSMS and the rest of the operating stack.

Each workflow from Otto encodes a playbook your team would otherwise run by hand, applied consistently across the conditions and constraints that actually fire it.

Available Today

Otto is live today for select partners, starting with reliability remediation for teams running it by hand today. The same layer extends to reporting, configuration checks, underutilization analysis, vendor escalation, and site-policy enforcement.

Vertically integrated operators solved this years ago, inside their own stacks. Otto is the same capability for everyone else, without asking you to rip out what you already run.