PULSE

AI-powered Slack agent that replaces daily standups. Employees submit 60-second briefs; PULSE generates an AI digest for managers every evening. No meetings needed.

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Inspiration

Daily standup meetings are one of the biggest time sinks in modern teams. A 15-minute standup with 8 people costs 2 hours of collective productivity every single day, most of which could be communicated asynchronously in under a minute per person. As a student building a creative agency, I wanted to build something that solves a real workflow problem I'd want to use myself.

What it does

PULSE automates the entire daily standup workflow inside Slack:

  • At 5 PM, PULSE DMs every team member a modal asking three things: what they completed, any blockers, and tomorrow's plan
  • At 5:45 PM, it sends a follow-up reminder only to people who haven't submitted yet
  • At 6 PM, PULSE generates an AI-powered digest summarizing the entire team's progress and posts it to the manager's channel
  • Managers can also run /pulse-report anytime for an instant digest, /pulse-status to see who's submitted, and /pulse-blockers to see active blockers across the team

How we built it

PULSE integrates Slack's Real-Time Search API to surface live workspace discussions related to reported blockers. When a manager runs /pulse-report, PULSE searches the workspace in real time and appends relevant channel discussions alongside the AI digest, giving managers full context without leaving Slack.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was working within free-tier constraints - I initially tried OpenAI and Gemini APIs but hit quota and billing restrictions. Switching to Groq's free tier solved this while keeping response times fast. I also had to fine-tune the AI prompts to prevent hallucinated blockers when no real blockers were reported, adding validation logic to filter false positives before they reach the AI.

What's next

Future plans include MCP integration with Google Calendar to automatically cancel standup meetings when 100% of the team has submitted their brief, plus weekly trend analysis to help managers spot recurring blockers across the team.

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