Hi all, eng who worked on vectors @ Retool here. We’re excited to get HN’s feedback on a new product I’ve been working on: Retool vectors. There’s been a lot of hype around AI, but as I was thinking about what we could launch, there were really very few AI apps that are today _actually_ delivering business value. For example, there are tons of chatbots, summarization bots, etc., but it wasn’t clear how to use them. There were bots that we could use for answering support tickets (we use Intercom), but when we tried using them, the results were far worse than expected (it only managed to close ~5% of our tickets, and required substantial human intervention).

I then tried building a custom AI chatbot for our support team, powered by a vector database (with previous answers, our docs, and community forum data). In my prototypes, the successful response rate was much higher (around 5 - 7x higher, ~30%). But it was surprisingly hard to build this bot: I needed to stitch together vector databases, custom integrations with Intercom, cronjobs to sync data, etc.

That’s why we built Retool Vectors. The idea is that we want to build a vector database that has full ETL from whatever inputs you have (e.g. Intercom, a postgres database, Salesforce, a community forum, a website, etc.). It’s always kept up to date. (We’re still working on some of these features, but I decided to try and launch this week because I just wanted to get feedback from HN, haha.) I think the industry has now settled on vector databases as the best way to provide context to LLMs. I hope that Retool Vectors can be a much easier way of getting data into it.

If you have any feedback please let me know!