What Is Ako? The AI Employee for Slack and WhatsApp
Ako is an AI employee for teams. You add it to Slack or message it on WhatsApp, it gets its own Slack handle, WhatsApp number and email address, and from then on it takes tasks the way a new hire would: pull last week’s Shopify orders and flag what has not shipped, chase a vendor, post the Monday pipeline summary before anyone logs on.
It launched on August 26, 2026. Founder Krishna Nandakumar’s launch post set out four principles: Ako is a colleague and not an extension of your identity, autonomy comes with guardrails you set, it is model agnostic, and it is multiplayer. He said it was already working for businesses in manufacturing, construction and e-commerce. The company behind it is Huskee Limited, and the terms are governed by the law of England and Wales.
What Ako does
Ako’s site describes three ways to put it to work:
- Tag it. Mention it in Slack or text its WhatsApp number and it acts now: pull a report, draft a reply, chase a delivery.
- Schedule it. “Every Monday at 8am, post the pipeline summary to #ops.” It shows up with the work done.
- Give it a goal. “Help me reduce my cost per acquisition.” It pulls the data, finds what is driving cost and builds you an interface to act on it.
That last part is Ako’s most distinctive feature. It builds custom interfaces on the fly: a dashboard to approve every email before it sends, a view to manage deals, a screen to track ad campaigns. Roles on the site are marketing, sales, operations and a generalist, and the pitch is that you hand it a job rather than a prompt.
It works over Slack, WhatsApp and email, with Microsoft Teams listed as coming soon. It connects to what the site calls hundreds of tools, naming HubSpot, Shopify, Linear, Stripe, Notion, Google Drive, GitHub, Figma, Salesforce, Jira, Intercom and QuickBooks. Under the hood it runs on Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini, with OpenRouter for routing, OpenAI for embeddings and ElevenLabs for voice, hosted on Render and AWS in the United States.
Ako pricing
Ako charges by credits, and the meter is the thing to understand before you pick a plan.
| Plan | Price | Credits |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 2,000 credits, one time |
| Lite | $19/mo | 2,000 a month |
| Starter | $49/mo | 5,000 a month |
| Pro | $199/mo | 25,000 a month |
| Managed setup | $499 one time | Available with Pro |
Every plan includes all three channels, unlimited users and unlimited scheduled tasks. Top-ups are 5,000 credits for $75 and never expire. Monthly credits on a paid plan expire at the end of each billing cycle.
What a credit buys, per Ako’s own table: a light task like a simple question costs 3 to 15 credits, a medium task like web research costs 80 to 150, and a heavy one like a multi-step workflow costs 300 to 500. The median task is 80 to 150. So the free grant is roughly 13 to 25 medium tasks in total, and Pro is roughly 166 to 312 medium tasks or 50 to 83 heavy workflows a month. The pricing page has a USD and INR toggle.
Controls and data
Ako’s answer to the autonomy question is a set of controls: per-user OAuth rather than shared admin credentials, an audit trail on every action, role-based access for who can reach it, review before anything goes out, and a spending limit per task. Each team’s data is isolated. Ako says its agreements with every model provider prohibit training on customer data, and that all data is deleted on request. The privacy policy is dated August 20, 2026.
Funding has not been disclosed. assistantbenchmark.com has collected 87 public comments about Ako but has not yet run it through its tests, and an independent research profile in June found no substantive discussion of it on Reddit, Hacker News or X. It is early.
Where Ako fits
Ako is built for the Slack-first team that wants reports pulled, deliveries watched and a dashboard built without a developer. The identity principle is the choice to weigh. Ako is deliberately its own colleague with its own email, which is right for chasing a vendor and wrong for replying to your client, who expects the mail from you.
That is the job Carly is built for. It reads your Gmail or Outlook and sends from your address, books on your real calendar, starts workflows when a lead lands or a meeting ends, and the agents you build carry that for a whole team. Carly connects to thousands of apps. Free Zapier-style workflows; AI agents from $35/month. Get started here.
For the field, see Ako alternatives, and for the head-to-head, Carly vs Ako.
Ready to automate your busywork?
Carly schedules, researches, and briefs you—so you can focus on what matters.
See what people say
"Before Carly, I relied on a Calendly link, but the whole process felt impersonal and not very professional. Carly changed that by handling all the back-and-forth, so I'm no longer stuck in endless email threads trying to line up schedules.
Now Carly reaches out to candidates, shares my real-time availability, lets them pick a slot, then sends a Zoom link and drops it straight into my calendar. She sends reminders to both of us before each call, which has significantly reduced no-shows and last-minute confusion.
On top of scheduling, Carly acts like a full executive assistant, sending me my schedule the night before so I can prepare for each call. It reminds me of the old x.ai assistant, but Carly is noticeably smarter, faster, and better suited to my healthcare recruitment business."
