tl;dr We’re building a visual no-code tool, integrated with the latest AI tech, to help non-technical teams automate. Improving productivity & job satisfaction.
The problem
Imagine the following scenario: You’re Joe from marketing, after getting your morning coffee, you click one of your bookmarks to view the report on your latest ad campaign.
ERROR
Sigh, you message the IT-team to take a look. You need this information ASAP to make decisions on today’s budget. After waiting a while, you get a reply: We’re backlogged and can maybe take a look in the afternoon.
Great… This is the second time this week it’s broken like this. All your high-impact tasks are now blocked until this is fixed. Let’s see if there’s anything else to do.
We’ll take the new batch of ads and tweak them based on internal feedback. This involves manually copying designs over from a shared drive, modifying them, then putting them back into the shared folder. Over and over…
You’ve asked for this to be automated but were told it’s not a priority and to keep working manually.
What could’ve been a 5 minute task ends up taking hours.
Nobody wants this.
As a company, people are your main asset and expenditure. You don’t want them doing repetitive tasks a computer should be doing. You don’t want them held back by an eternally overloaded IT-department. You want them to be enabled, to automate where they can, by themselves, so that they can focus on what’s important.
Going codeless
No-code tools, combined with AI-enabled natural language interaction, have the potential to democratize software. We’re already seeing huge productivity improvements with the help of chatbots like ChatGPT. The next step is not just acceleration but bottom-up automation.
Instead of relying on formal software development processes, involving long cycles of requirement gathering, development & feedback; We can enable non-technical people to build automations as they see fit, where and when they need them.
In short: Being able to talk to your computer in your natural language, combined with an intuitive UI that allows you to visually build software, will allow anyone to program & automate. That’s where our project comes in:
Contraptions.ai
Contraptions is a project started by me and my trusted co-founder Robin. We’re both software engineers and have experienced the story above many times throughout our careers. Frustrated at the fact that even in 2024, non-technical people still have to go through IT-middlemen to get anything non-trivial done, we decided to set out on building a solution.
We’ll soon be seeking validation with small pilot projects. If you’re interested, contact me!
Read more about this project in a future post!