Bardeen, The Automation App Enhancing Human Productivity

Literally hundreds of apps have appeared seemingly overnight in the wake of ChatGPT, making it impossible to keep track of them all. But one worth keeping an eye on is Bardeen.ai, a workflow automation tool that operates in your browser.

At first glance, Bardeen may look like just another automation tool elbowing its way into a very crowded space. Yet, it introduces a significant wrinkle: context, meaning it builds automations based on what’s open on your computer screen. It also uses AI to build automations for you - making it vastly faster than its competitors.

Unlike other automation tools such as Zapier, Bardeen runs as an extension in the user’s browser, so users never have to switch windows to use it. And it reads the tabs open in the browser to build automations that are context aware. That means with the click of a button, Bardeen scans what is open on the page and can extract information for use in email drafts, Slack messages, Jira notifications, etc. No more context switching or Saas sprawl.

Carl Ritchie, a salesman at Deel, a fast growing global hiring and payroll platform, says he uses Bardeen every day for prospecting and outreach and automating tasks throughout his day.

“It definitely took some time to learn how to use,” said Ritchie, “but for the time invested, a hundred times that has been saved, and now with MagicBox it’s even easier to get started!”

Ritchie has become a Bardeen superuser at Deel and rolls out automations to his team using Bardeen’s handy ‘share’ function. One automation that Ritchie built with Bardeen scans competitor pages on Trustpilot, a review site, and sends him a Slack message whenever it spots a negative review. Ritchie then reaches out to the reviewer offering Deel as an alternative.

https://vimeo.com/821665636?share=copy&embedable=true

Business process automation can be traced back to the 1950s and 1960s, when companies began developing custom built solutions to harness the new advances in computer technology. The 1970s brought more sophisticated tools, including enterprise resource planning systems and workflow management software, which automated everything from inventory tracking to customer service.

The rise of the internet and cloud computing led to further innovation that unstuck automation and sent it flying across departments and geographies.

But nothing has accelerated automation as much as artificial intelligence, particularly natural language processing and the advent of large language models like OpenAI’s GPT-4. For most repetitive, digital tasks, it’s only a matter of engineering to get an AI system to do it.

Knowledge workers spend as much as 40% of their time on repetitive tasks, a significant waste of time and resources that could be better spent elsewhere. Yet, automation is still limited to large corporations or individuals with technical knowledge. As a result, adoption rates remain low. But Bardeen aims to make automation easy and accessible to everyone.

Bardeen’s founders, Pascal Weinberger, CEO, and Artem Harutyunyan, CTO, formed the company in early 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down much of the global economy. They named their company after John Bardeen, two-time Nobel Prize winner and co-inventor of the transistor.

Weinberger is a self-taught computer programmer from Germany who dropped out of college and worked on a series of startups and projects before leading the AI team at Telefonica’s Barcelona-based skunkworks, Alpha Labs.

Harutyunyan came out of Mesosphere, now D2iQ, which builds orchestration software to control applications running across different hardware. One of Mesosphere’s founders and CEO, Florian Leibert, was one of Bardeen’s first investors.

In many ways, Bardeen is also a kind of orchestration platform, allowing users to mix and match dozens of applications into a single workflow - Weinberger calls it a kind of ‘superglue’ that holds productivity apps together.

The robotic process automation market is mature, with recognized dominant players. But Weinberger believes that the industry faces a slow decline because it lacks solutions for automating tasks with modern SaaS apps, such as Hootsuite and Hubspot.

Meanwhile, newer automation solutions, such as Zapier and UiPath, are ‘trigger-based,’ designed to execute a series of actions in response to a trigger – when a website is updated for example. But these tools do not consider the user’s current context or real-time decision making.

Weinberger and Harutyunyan aimed to provide contextual automations that were easy to build and did not require coding. Their first prototype met their own immediate needs: an automation that scraped personnel data from GitHub pages and wrote recruiting emails to software engineers.

“We saw an opportunity between older robotic process automation and modern SaaS apps,” said Weinberger by phone. Indeed, creating an automation with Bardeen is faster and easier than most Saas apps.

Mesosphere’s Leibert, who had left to start a venture capital firm, 468 Capital, led Bardeen’s seed round of3.5 million in February last year, which was followed, less than six months later, by it’s $15.3 million series A. The Series A round was led by Insight Partners’ Praveen Akkiraju, an automation software veteran, having served on the Board of robotic process automation giant Automation Anywhere.

Bardeen's product is aimed at modern knowledge workers who use the so-called “hipster productivity stack” - tools like Notion, Table, HubSpot, ClickUp, Salesforce, and Gmail. The company’s roadmap reflects feedback from an engaged community of users hundreds of thousands strong.

Already, Bardeen works with more than fifty apps, from OpenAI’s GPT-4 to ClickUp, HubSpot, Notion, Google Sheets and more. It is adding about one more app per week.

It offers several advantages: Bardeen's automations run locally on the user's device, which makes it more cost-effective and privacy friendly. It is built with AI embedded into the product from the start and the platform learns continuously, improving its functionality. If a user edits the output and the edit makes sense, it is reviewed by Bardeen, and the platform is improved in real-time.

“Playbooks” and “MagicBox” are two key features of the Bardeen automation tool.

A playbook is a pre-built workflow or template that automates a specific task. Playbooks are designed to be easy to use and customizable, allowing users to quickly automate repetitive tasks without needing any programming skills.

Knowledge workers spend as much as 40% of their time on repetitive tasks, a significant waste of time and resources that could be better spent elsewhere.

Bardeen offers a vast library of pre-built playbooks for a wide range of tasks, including data entry, report generation, social media management, and more. Users can also create their own custom playbooks using the drag-and-drop interface, which can then be shared with others in their organization.

The MagicBox is like an AI enabled search box into which users describe an automation. The interface returns a custom workflow that users can modify by selecting pre-built actions from a list. Its use of generative AI puts it ahead of its competitors, many of whom have promises and demos but long waiting lists for the feature.

Others in this category are trying to train generative models to automate tasks, which is very cost and time intensive and has yet to show results, whereas with Bardeen’s approach the generative AI is used to build and suggest an automation template to the user, who can then use the platform’s intuitive no-code builder to adjust it to their needs. When the same task has to be automated multiple times, the user then simply needs to click a button and the automation is triggered. That makes it an easy and reliable way to save time and remove friction from every knowledge worker's daily tasks.

Combined, the features are like a virtual Swiss army knife for workplace productivity. Anyone can create and deploy automation workflows on the platform with a little training, regardless of their technical expertise.

Bardeen can automate tasks such as sales, recruiting, sourcing work for analysts, and things like even email or meeting management, social media posting, and file organization, allowing users to work more efficiently and effectively from anywhere. Its goal is to help people automate the repetitive and mundane tasks that consume so much of their time and energy, freeing them up to focus on more creative and fulfilling work.

As we move further into the digital age, the demand for automation tools like Bardeen is only going to increase. This has raised concerns about job displacement and the erosion of human skills and creativity. But Bardeen offers a glimmer of hope, suggesting that it is possible to harness these powerful technologies in ways that enhance our human productivity by collaborating with AI.