UpdateAI: Revolutionizing status updates for teams

Today, we’re excited to launch our latest AI tool. UpdateAI tackles the time-consuming, sometimes tedious, yet incredibly important ritual of generating status updates and project summaries by intelligently automating the process. Using the Charma platform, you can integrate your organization’s CRM data and use UpdateAI to generate relevant, meaningful, timely, and specific updates geared towards your particular needs. If you need to generate monthly updates for higher ups, weekly updates for cross-functional teams, project summaries for organization-wide dissemination, then UpdateAI is for you.

Charma first began building AI tools to support managers and their teams back in 2021, launching SurfaceAI (an AI that generates actionable insights based on your existing tools and apps) and FeedbackAI (AI that helps you write relevant, thoughtful, and professionally worded feedback). We continue to explore and iterate on how AI can best support organizations focused on people management and performance enablement.

Check out our demo of UpdateAI, and read on for a Q&A with Charma’s product and engineering team to better understand our approach to AI and the strategy behind UpdateAI in particular.

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📌 Sign up for Charma and try UpdateAI for yourself →

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What challenges does UpdateAI address?

UpdateAI is designed to tackle the common issues associated with internal communications, particularly status updates. In fast-paced work environments, individuals and teams often struggle to consistently communicate progress, goals, and obstacles. UpdateAI decreases the burden by automatically creating detailed and meaningful status updates, ensuring that teams stay informed without having to compromise their primary responsibilities.

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What value does UpdateAI bring to organizations, and what inspired its creation?

UpdateAI is a game-changer for cross-functional communication within organizations. By automating the creation of status updates, it significantly reduces the time and effort typically invested in manual communication. Additionally, UpdateAI enhances the quality of these communications by providing precise and comprehensive updates, fostering improved collaboration across departments. This tool was inspired by the belief that efficient and open communication is a cornerstone for business success. UpdateAI streamlines this process and empowers teams to focus on innovation and productivity.

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Can you give an overview of how UpdateAI functions?

UpdateAI operates by integrating with your preferred apps within Charma, allowing you to select a date range and modify input prompts to generate an output. This output can be saved, edited, and shared as needed. One of the challenges in developing UpdateAI was accommodating the diverse ways organizations store and communicate data. For instance, different CRM systems have custom fields. To address this, UpdateAI offers a library of prompts to get users started and provides dedicated customer support to address any queries.

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What are some of the ways in which UpdateAI can be used?

UpdateAI is versatile and can be used in a range of scenarios.

• Product managers can leverage UpdateAI to automatically compile updates from various sources like Jira and Slack, keeping stakeholders informed about the progress of new features.
• Sales teams can use it to effortlessly generate sales reports by integrating CRM tools, ensuring that the leadership is up-to-date with the latest figures.
• Project managers can use UpdateAI to generate high-level executive project summaries to share with VPs and CEOs, or understand the status of a given project.
• HR departments can use UpdateAI to streamline internal communications, fostering a culture of openness and collaboration within the organization.

📌 Try UpdateAI for yourself →

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How can a user get the greatest benefit from UpdateAI?

To unlock the full potential of UpdateAI, start by exploring our mini prompt library for suggested phrases. Customize the input to include specific details such as project names or sales progress. If you have custom fields in CRM tools, instruct UpdateAI to search for those in the prompt. If the output doesn't meet your expectations, you can regenerate it, refine it, or edit it manually. Finally, don't hesitate to reach out to our customer success team for tips, tricks, or to set up a demo for your team.

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How do you  ensure security and handle permissions with UpdateAI?

UpdateAI, like all of Charma’s feature-set, is built with security as a top priority:

• UpdateAI sends only embeddings, not actual data, to PineconeDB.
• Data is sent to OpenAI, but it’s important to note that OpenAI is also SOC 2 Type 2 certified, ensuring a high standard of security. OpenAI also does not retain any data beyond 30 days. More details on OpenAI’s data usage policies can be found here.
• Charma is SOC 2 Type 2 certified, which is a certification given to companies that have demonstrated strong controls and security practices for handling and protecting customer data. We adhere to industry best practices and comply with regulatory standards to safeguard the privacy and security of our users' information.

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How is UpdateAI different from other general-purpose GPT models and AI tools?

UpdateAI is designed to be a specialized AI tool that seamlessly integrates with your organization’s internal data sources, such as Slack, Jira, and other CRM tools. By doing so, it can generate tailored status updates specific to your work environment and objectives. Unlike general-purpose GPT models, which provide generic responses, UpdateAI leverages your company’s data by utilizing advanced embedding and vector databases to offer detailed insights into things like product milestones, blockers, and summaries. In contrast, a general-purpose AI model might generate a broader range of responses without the specific contextual understanding that UpdateAI brings, resulting in less insightful updates tailored to your personal workflow. 

As a specific example, UpdateAI can synthesize sales updates in a more meaningful way. Instead of a general-purpose GPT model saying, "Your sales performance has improved this quarter," UpdateAI could tell you, "Company A is on the verge of closing a deal, boosting this quarter's sales by 15%."

Think of UpdateAI as a powerful tool  that helps answer project- or sales-related questions by searching and summarizing data stored across your company’s applications.

We’re incredibly excited to launch UpdateAI and are making it available to all early adopters free of charge and without usage caps, unlike competitors who often have paywalls or usage limits.

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What hurdles did you face when integrating OpenAI’s technology into UpdateAI?

Integrating OpenAI's technology presented a variety of challenges. The primary obstacle was ensuring that the AI-generated content was human-like, intuitive, and high quality. We also had to tackle the token limits, which dictate the maximum amount of content that can be processed for contextual understanding.

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ChatGPT and AI have obviously become a major part of the zeitgeist. When did the team first think of this feature idea?

Broadly, Charma recognizes that an increasing reliance on digital communication, especially post-pandemic, has created an increased need for streamlined and efficient internal communication tools.

Upon conducting user research in March of 2023, it became clear that UpdateAI could help address an existing pain point in that vein by facilitating automatic and more frequent communication among teams. UpdateAI also felt like a natural and logical addition to our existing suite of AI tools, including AgendaAI, FeedbackAI, and SurfaceAI.

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What is the company’s long-term vision and how does it plan to transform workplace collaboration using AI?

At Charma, our goal is to give managers superpowers, and we imagine a future where AI acts as an assistant, streamlining interactions ranging from agenda creation to performance reviews. Our goal is to eliminate the friction that hampers collaboration, empowering teams to work seamlessly and focus on what truly matters. Through Charma, we want to enable teams to be their best selves by making collaboration not just simpler, but also more meaningful and effective. We’re committed to continuous innovation and responsiveness to our users’ needs as we build a future where UpdateAI is synonymous with exceptional workplace collaboration.

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📌 Use UpdateAI to generate a status update →