Meet Howdy, Our Digital Co-Worker

I recently wrote a piece in Fast Company about what I call “assistive intelligence”—a movement to augment our increasingly overwhelming daily lives with automation. We have reached a point in technology where tasks and processes can be completely automated, which changes how we as humans operate in the workplace and in our daily lives. The driving force behind this movement is the emergence of bots, which for the uninitiated are software applications that run automated tasks. Many of you are already familiar with the Slackbot, and that is just scratching the surface. Automation facilitated by bots is going to be as major a wave as data was in 2009, and I am pretty excited about it.

This brings me to Howdy, a new company in the True portfolio that is creating automation and scripting tools that enable developers to create applications that live inside messaging apps. Founded by Ben Brown and Katie Spence, Howdy’s flagship bot product is Howdy for Slack, which will seamlessly integrate new functionality without requiring users to interact with external websites or apps. Users will interact with the Howdy bot within Slack using natural language commands like “start a meeting,” which will notify and organize a team to get ready for a meeting.

Based in Austin, Ben and Katie started building Slack bots for their consulting business soon after Slack launched. As they talked to more teams in the Slack Developer channel, they saw the opportunity to build bots for other teams looking to squeeze even more efficiency out of the messaging collaboration environment, and Howdy was born.

We’ve known Ben since the Internet 2.0 days—True Design Partner Jeff Veen has advised two of his previous companies, one of which was acquired by CNet. Ben understands better than most what the future of the automated workplace looks like (read his post on Medium), and we believe he is at the forefront of the user experience for messaging interfaces. Bots are tools of convenience for the connected civilization, and we are excited to be partnering with the early leaders of this new space.

Ben and Katie, welcome to True.