I'm Venkat, a student from India currently studying Human-Computer Interaction.

Recently, I’ve been using a lot of AI tools to help with research and digging up information - but most of them feel like solo conversations. It’s just me and the bot. I kept wondering: what would it look like if a whole team could collaborate with AI?

To explore this topic further, I’ve been building Genie, a Slack app that helps your team with data gathering and research tasks. Genie is a Slack magician you can summon like a teammate.

Genie helps your team gather answers from internal sources (like Notion, Confluence, or your CRM), run deep web research, and even run research workflows through tools like Zapier and n8n - all without leaving Slack. Just with a mention [ @genie - "can you find this?" ]

This started as a hobby project to scratch my own itch, but a few friends are already using it and finding it genuinely helpful. I’m sharing it here to see if this is something the HN community would find valuable.

If there's enough interest, I’d love to turn Genie into a proper product — and build it in public, sharing everything I learn along the way. I’d love to hear what kinds of problems you’d want a teammate like Genie to help with. If you sign up, it helps me understand what to build next. Comments and criticisms are welcome!

For early adopters, we plan to run a custom onboarding and priority support on slack.

Here is our website: https://genie-slack-connect.lovable.app/

Thanks for reading!