Dust

“centralized AI agents that boost workflows”

Pros

Having this software in place helped us bring different data sources and tools into one hub and build agents that make our daily work more efficient. The platform is easy to use and the onboarding process with their team went really well. Our product and engineering teams were able to start building agents quickly without needing technical help. For example our support agent connects Zendesk and Notion to handle recurring questions on its own, the Jira/Slack agent creates and assigns tickets automatically when someone reports a bug in a channel and our data agent uses Mixpanel plus Notion to add product context to metrics. It has cut down a lot of the back and forth between separate tools.

Cons

A limitation is that the output quality is very dependent on how clean and organized the source data is so we had to spend quite a bit of time cleaning things up beforehand. Pulling information from large datasets can also be somewhat unreliable. In heavily used Google Drive spaces we've seen cases where the agent failed to surface information that was definitely there. It's not a constant problem but it does happen from time to time.

“all-in-one platform”

Pros

Build agents connected to multiple MCPs and skills being all in one place is really valuable! It brings everything together nicely and makes the setup feel much more capable.

Cons

One downside is that the agent doesn't really learn from its mistakes on its own. If something goes wrong you still have to go into the instructions manually and fix it yourself.

“frustrating reliability”

Pros

Compared with Zapier this saves me from a lot of painful manual automation work and in some cases it can handle things that just aren't possible for us because of the way our G Suite access is set up. Creating new agents is quick and after using both Zapier and n8n this feels much less time consuming and less prone to mistakes.

Cons

A lot of the newer features feel like they're offered when they're only about 75% finished while older issues still don't get fixed. We keep running into strange recurring Google Drive access requests and the Sidekick app being the default text box while editing an agent is confusing. Then when I ask it to edit an agent it says it can't access the instructions or instead of making 2-3 small replacements, it suggests replacing the whole instruction set which is really irritating. It has also been down more often than it has been reliably working. The Instructions text box is another problem area because it doesn't properly support XML. If you format something in XML and copy paste it in, it strips out all the tags and nesting. There are also tiny quality of life fixes we've been asking for over months like folders for agents or making the sorting button stay sticky instead of resetting to the least useful option every time. I understand there are lots of new features and opportunities they want to pursue but I'd much rather see the team spend more time polishing the current product and making it less buggy, less laggy and more dependable. On top of that the initial onboarding support from them was pretty weak. Instead of understanding our basic tool stack and helping us configure everything properly they often couldn't answer simple setup questions and pushed bug workaround discussions back onto our IT team to solve themselves. That's especially disappointing because we're not using anything unusual just common tools like G Suite, Notion, Okta and Zendesk.