An AI colleague that knows who knows what

How El Niño built OKREBOT: an AI agent in Slack that answers questions about our own company from Slack, GitLab and our planning tools, with sources.

OKREBOT explains in Slack how to book learning time at El Niño

Ask anything about El Niño, right in Slack

Knowledge everywhere
El Niño is a self-steering agency with several squads, many clients and a lot of knowledge spread over Slack threads, GitLab and our planning tools. That makes a simple question like "who knows this client best?" or "why did we decide this?" surprisingly hard to answer.

The answer already exists
Most answers are already written down somewhere: in a Slack thread, an issue, a merge request or the code itself. But finding them takes time, and you often need to know who to ask first.

Just ask OKREBOT
Our data science team built OKREBOT, an AI agent that lives in Slack. Colleagues ask it a question in a channel or a direct message, and OKREBOT streams the answer back, with links to its sources.

OKREBOT explains in Slack how to request a software license, with links to its sources
Ask OKREBOT how something works at El Niño, and it answers with the steps and the announcements it based them on.

How OKREBOT works

One agent, many sources
The agent is built with LangGraph. It searches Slack messages, files and canvases, reads full threads, searches code and wiki pages in GitLab, and looks up squad and project data in our planning tools.

A map of who knows what
A background process reads Slack and GitLab thread by thread and builds a knowledge graph in Neo4j: which people, projects, clients, topics and decisions are connected, with a source for every fact. So OKREBOT can answer "who knows X?" or "why did we decide Y?" with the threads to back it up.

Answers you can check
OKREBOT reads the source behind every central fact and links to it. It says so when an answer rests on a single thread, and it checks that a person still works here before recommending them as a contact.

Our data stays with us
OKREBOT runs locally on our own infrastructure, independent of the big AI companies. Our Slack conversations, code and plans never leave El Niño and are not shared with any external AI provider.

OKREBOT finds an earlier Slack thread about a technical change and links to it
Half-remember a discussion? OKREBOT finds the thread, tells you who made the change and when, and links to the source.

The result

Colleagues get answers about our own company in seconds, with links to the source, instead of asking around. And what we learn from running OKREBOT goes straight into the AI agents we build for clients, like the VRM AI Agent for Victron Energy. And because it all runs on our own infrastructure, none of that company knowledge ends up with the big AI companies.

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