Howdy co-founder Ben Brown writes, “What if you had a coworker who could take the most boring, repetitive and mundane tasks off of your plate and perform them with tireless dedication, endless patience and perfect accuracy?” That’s the vision guiding Howdy, an automation tool released Tuesday for Slack. Howdy automates meetings by asking team members questions, collecting information, and sharing it with the team leader, and can work either in public channels or in private messages. Smith writes that Howdy can make meetings shorter, because the tool can communicate with multiple people at once in ways that humans cannot.