Visited a coworking space in Austin that ran everything on Slack bots

I had a delivery to this coworking space in Austin last Tuesday called The Grove. While I was waiting, I saw they had a bot handling their sign-in system, another one for booking rooms, and even a Slack bot for ordering lunch. It got me thinking about how many manual ops tasks in SaaS could be automated with simple bot integrations. Has anyone here tried building a custom bot for their own operations workflow?

3 comments

3 Comments

adams.uma10d ago

My first thought is that bots can actually add more friction than they solve, lol. I had a client who used a Slack bot for their HR ticketing and it would randomly misinterpret simple requests like "I need a new laptop charger" as a complex IT escalation. It took them a week to train it not to flag basic stuff. Things like sign-ins and room booking feel safer, but for anything that involves human judgement or nuance, I'd rather just have a real person handle it.

patricia26210d ago

I gotta push back on this a little, @adams.uma. That "human judgement" part you mentioned - I think bots are actually better at handling routine stuff without getting tired or distracted. Yeah, your client had a bad bot experience, but that sounds like a setup issue not a bot problem. A well trained bot can process 100 ticket requests in the time it takes a human to do 10, and it won't accidentally skip someone's request because they had a rough morning. My question is, have you ever seen a bot handle something like password resets or simple approvals really well, or are you just going off that one bad example?

thomas_sanchez10d ago

Feel you on this one. I had a similar thing happen with a support bot at my old job that kept routing "my mouse is acting weird" to the hardware team for a replacement, but the guy just needed to change the batteries. It's like they either flag everything or nothing, no middle ground. The training period is way more painful than people admit, especially when you've got a team that just wants to get back to work. I'm with you on the basic stuff like sign-ins being fine, but anything that needs a human to just listen and use common sense? Nah, let a real person handle it.