It's time to rethink chat

Today's chat tools feel dated. It's time for a startup to rethink them.

Notion is an example of a team firing on all cylinders to become AI-native. But, no communication tools seem to have cracked AI.

I believe there's an opportunity for a startup to take on chat. Something built from the ground-up with AI. Something that becomes "ChatGPT for teams", growing in knowledge as teams use it, and self-training AI agents for the entire team.

Imagine opening the app, clicking the universal "Compose" button to type “the app seems down”, then the AI directing you to the oncall channel, explaining that there’s already a thread going, and drafting a recommended message for you to post +1 - I'm also unable to access the site.

I'm not going to build this. But, if I were going to - here would be my wishlist:

• A personal AI bot who can run searches for you and return results, like "find and summarizes all ideas to improve our pricing page"
• Live proofreading of messages
• AI image generation inline
• Smart "to-do" list, including being able to assign to-dos to other people
• Detecting when somebody is waiting on a response from you, and adding it to your to-do list
• AI titles and summaries of ongoing threads
• Detecting when discussions have reached a decision, posting the outcome in the channel, and closing the thread
• Allow users to make their own bots, including knowledge, tools, and prompt-level controls - no AI horseless carriage
  • Marketing team can train their bot on guidelines, like "use oxford commas", and other teams can ask questions of it
  • Engineering team can make a moderation bot, which auto-removes offtopic posts from their oncall channel
  • Product team can have a bot that tags the relevant PM in every support disucssion - "Sales team is talking about a feature you work on"
  • HR team can build a bot that auto-labels discussions in its channel, such as "Question" or "Feedback"
  • Execs can have a bot that sends a daily summary of discussions across teams ("Here were biggest customer support issues yesterday), but can escalate high-priority discussions in real-time
• Prompt-level control of which notifications you want from which channel
• Full support for users without photos (showing initials instead of blob photos)
• No presence indicator because talking about work is not a discussion for doing work
• Shared channels across teams