Information Overload.

With the invention of computers, came the information age. While the industrial revolution made it possible for information to be consistently documented and replicated, the information age has seen the speed that said information can be distributed change from years, months and weeks to seconds, hours and minutes.

It’s showing no signs of slowing down.

A (brief) introduction to the Founders, and the inspiration for Gist

Ian and I met at Monzo Bank back in 2017, in the early days when the hot coral card was a fashion statement rather than a regulated bank account. We both started in ‘night shift’ (3PM - Midnight) customer support roles and from both of our respective day 1s we recognised that the speed of Monzo’s growth meant that an incredible amount of information was being generated per day. It wasn’t an uncommon occurrence for us to be given a process to deal with a new, novel scenario one day only to find that said policy had been completely changed by the time we logged on the next.

So we, along with many other members of the (then) 40-50 strong customer operations team, spent a significant amount of our day just getting caught up. Then the next part of the day trying to figure out ways to get caught up faster tomorrow. All while juggling incoming customer tickets.

Pre-AI Solutions

We ended up defining roles with titles like ‘activity lead’, which would make it one person's job to bring together all the really important stuff that had happened in the previous hours and collate it into a single post. The moment we had a solution that seemed to work, it would break again and it would be back to the drawing board.

But this wasn’t just isolated to customer operations, and having both worked in other tech companies and start ups since. It’s definitely not a problem that was exclusive to Monzo.

Working together, again.

A number of years later, having both moved on from Monzo we found ourselves colleagues for the second time at Prolific. As the TechOps team (and outside of the much more strictly regulated banking industry) we had a bit more time to observe, plan and bounce ideas off each other. By this time, we were also seeing the rise of AI throughout the tech industry (and beyond). Making ideas we could have only dreamed of back in 2017 real, tangible possibilities.

Just like in 2017, the biggest problem to tackle was how to make sense of the torrential stream of information generated each day. AI has made this stream stronger, giving companies and employees incredible productivity gains. But we think it also holds a solution.

Introducing Gist.

We began discussing the idea of Gist (known then, imaginatively as ‘a slack summariser’ ) some time ago, but just as we were about to get it off the ground I accepted a new job (sorry Ian). But the idea stuck around. Ian worked on his version, and we continued to bounce ideas off each other of what the ‘Slack Summariser’ could be. With me periodically telling him that this idea had way more potential than we were giving it credit for. I then worked on a version for a hackathon at my current job. Afterwards, we swapped notes (and code) and ‘Gist’ clicked into place. This was a real product, with real utility. It wasn’t just a ‘cheap way of getting Slack AI’. It offered capabilities beyond Slack’s native offering, capabilities that we think that can bring significant value and focus to a wide range of teams.

Our goal is to help you, your team, your company, cut through the noise. Gist not only functions as the ‘activity lead’ and allows your team to get the important updates in one place. But also streamlines your work day.

Need to know what to cover in your engineering stand up? Extract the action items and decisions from your team's Slack activity. You can cast your net across multiple channels, or just to a single thread.

Maybe you’ve just started, and you’re not familiar with all the internal jargon just yet. Hit the ELI5 style and get the internal complexities broken down into more manageable terms.

In Summary: