The Review

What It Does

Dust combines cross-platform knowledge search with easy AI Agent creation.

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Why Ops Leaders Should Care

AI Agents are exciting, but the real key to extracting value from AI in the enterprise is maximizing adoption. Dust customers say this is where the platform excels - with an intuitive interface, powerful integrations, and ability to collaborate across your full team, Dust should be less intimidating than other tools.

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Key Features (Pros & Cons)

Pros

• Proprietary “smart search” is the best on the market, preserving document structure and making retrieving the info you need very easy across lots of sources - users report that Dust’s RAG is “far more effective than Microsoft Copilot’s or ChatGPT’s”
• Easy for non-technical users to get started: a lot of the technical jargon and tasks are abstracted into a UI that pretty much anyone can get the hang of
• Simple to customize: create multiple, single-function agents and choose which model you’re using on a tool-by-tool or query-by-query basis
• Multi-function capabilities: string together multiple tasks with a single agents
• Interact with Dust agents where you work: chat with them on Slack or use their Chrome Extension
• Strong customer service: the helpful community Slack and responsive customer service are consistent themes across reviews

Cons

• Simple UI leans more ‘prosumer’ than sophisticated enterprise user
• Isn’t powerful ‘out of the box’: like most systems of this kind, it’ll require a fair amount of effort to connect all your data sources, customize your agents, and make sure permissions are set up correctly
• Data sync is sometimes slow or incomplete: some customers mention encountering issues with access to certain Notion databases, making their platform’s output less useful
• Cost: while a 14-day free trial is available, the Pro plan is $29/user/month. While this isn’t unreasonable (and includes usage of the underlying models, which can add up), for teams at small companies, this could be too much to stomach.

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An Operator’s Perspective

Dust’s home screen

Agents have been the hot topic of AI for a while now, so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to check out the Sequoia-backed, Paris-based agent platform. The platform was easy to onboard to, though I didn’t go to the extent of connecting all of my company’s tools to it.

Creating an agent

The agent creation flow will be intuitive to anyone who has created a custom GPT on ChatGPT.

Which leads me to my real take here: it’s difficult to see how this is substantially better than ChatGPT (though user reviews claim that the search/access to tools is much better). While there are important reasons to buy an enterprise skin on a multi-model infrastructure base (collaboration, security, etc.), calling this an “agent” platform seems like a bit of a stretch.

Also noteworthy, while Sequoia led Dust’s Seed and Series A, they haven’t announced a new round since mid-2024. In the hottest market ever for AI startups, that’s interesting…

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Other Options

Bottom Line

If you’re looking for a simple but powerful tool to spin up agents and collaborate across your team, and you’re not scared of the price point, Dust could be worth a try.

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