Meet a workplace AI cross-app platform that shows employees what’s important

If you find yourself at work zapping between multiple digital communication platforms and channels, facing a mountain of notifications and a flood of emails, then you could be experiencing what is commonly described as information workload.

At times, wading through vast information at the workplace to focus on what’s most important is like searching for a needle in the haystack, leaving tasks scattered in a growing challenge to productivity in the modern knowledge economy.

An Israeli startup is now embracing generative AI technology to build a platform to simplify communication in the workplace by creating a single AI-managed hub that centralizes employee work apps, aiming to reduce the stress associated with information overload and enhance productivity.

TheGist is launching a cross-app hub that it says “supercharges” humans by deploying machine learning tools to let AI direct what’s important and needs attention, so users can help make informed and timely decisions in the digital workplace.

The company was founded in 2022 by Itzik Ben Bassat, former executive at Blizzard Entertainment and Wix; Itay Dressler, former VP of Engineering at Openweb; and Wix president & COO Nir Zohar.

The unified platform harnesses the power of AI to work across apps, instead of only within apps, and covers the entire digital workspace including insights, tasks, daily focus, generative text, summaries, and actions.

“AI excels at sorting, analyzing, and connecting vast amounts of information, while humans possess the unique ability to draw personalized conclusions aligned with their perspectives and organizational goals,” said Zohar. “At theGist, our goal is to leverage AI for routine calculations, empowering individuals to focus on the work they do best.”

TheGist says that working from a unified workspace helps to tackle two of the biggest challenges affecting employees’ productivity: constant context switching and working on “low-leverage tasks instead of clarifying which tasks genuinely move the needle.”

The startup’s platform forms personalized knowledge graphs, connecting projects, people, and topics. It is designed to help amplify focus and boost productivity by delivering personalized AI insights and streamlined workflows, theGist said.

“We called the company theGist because our goal is to create radical focus and extreme performance by allowing AI to sort out all the noise and laser focus you on what’s truly important,” said Ben-Bassat, who serves as CEO of theGist. “What differentiates theGist and enables our AI models to be accurate is the focus on personalization.”

Recent research by software firm OpenText found that eight in ten employees experience information overload, citing factors such as constant information feed, and too many apps to check each day — up from 60% in a survey conducted in 2020. About 27% of the respondents in the survey said they must cater to 11 or more accounts, resources, tools and apps on a daily basis to access the information they need to complete their tasks, up from 15% in the previous survey.

Almost half, or 47% of surveyed workers said that they spend more than one hour of every working day searching for files or specific data to be able to do their job and more than four in 10 said the information they need is hard to find as it is scattered across multiple sites, files and apps.

In November, theGist raised $7 million in in pre-seed funding, co-led by venture capital firms StageOne Ventures and Aleph, and launched its first product using AI tools for the scanning of Slack messages and instant personalized summaries and highlights to help prioritize which are important. The tool is used by thousands of teams at several large companies, including Wix, Snyk, and Lemonade, according to the startup’s website.