Table of Contents
Overview
Modern work is fragmented. Employees navigate between email, task managers, spreadsheets, and project tracking tools, spending considerable time switching between disconnected systems. Refinder addresses this fragmentation by enabling users to execute business tasks directly within Google Chat and Slack through conversational commands. Rather than switching between applications, teams can book meetings, update project records, manage data, and search organizational knowledge through natural language dialogue. Built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP) standard by Anthropic, Refinder connects to enterprise applications including Google Workspace, Jira, Notion, and others, enabling AI agents to automate complex workflows from a single conversational interface.
Developed by Thinkfree, a Seoul-based software company specializing in productivity and AI solutions for enterprises, Refinder launched its AI Agent capabilities in November 2025. The platform combines three core capabilities: unified enterprise search across organizational data, conversational AI assistance, and automated task execution—all accessible directly from existing communication platforms.
Key Features
Refinder delivers AI agent capabilities purpose-built for team productivity within existing chat platforms:
- Chat-driven task automation: Execute complex business processes through natural language commands within Google Chat or Slack, including meeting scheduling, record updates, data retrieval, and workflow triggers, without leaving your team’s communication platform.
- Unified enterprise search: Search and retrieve information across all connected business applications (Google Drive, Notion, Jira, Google Sheets, Confluence) from a single interface, with AI-generated summaries and trusted answers citing source documents.
- Multi-application integration: Connect to 80+ enterprise tools including Google Workspace, Jira, Notion, Slack, and others using the Model Context Protocol (MCP) standard, enabling seamless workflow orchestration across your technology stack.
- Natural language workflow automation: Create complex business processes without coding by describing what you want in conversation—the AI agent interprets intent and executes multi-step workflows across connected applications.
- Role-based access control: Workspace-level security controls ensure sensitive data access is restricted according to organizational permissions and existing application access rules, with role-based access governance determining which users and teams can trigger specific automations.
- Personal and team-level deployment: Create individual AI agents for personal task management or deploy shared agents in team channels to standardize processes, automate onboarding, and coordinate project-specific workflows.
- Minimal setup: Begin using Refinder with simple authorization through your chat platform, requiring no complex configuration or technical expertise to deploy initial automations.
How It Works
Refinder operates through a straightforward workflow integrated directly into your messaging platform:
- Authorize and connect your applications: Begin by authorizing Refinder to access your Google Chat or Slack workspace and connect your business applications (Google Workspace, Jira, Notion, etc.) through secure OAuth authentication.
- Describe what you want to automate: In your chat window, simply describe tasks conversationally—”Schedule a meeting with the marketing team for next Thursday” or “Update all open Jira tickets to show progress.” Refinder’s AI agent interprets your intent and identifies required actions.
- Execute automated workflows: The AI agent coordinates across connected applications to complete your request. For example, when scheduling a meeting, it accesses all attendees’ calendars, proposes optimal times, creates calendar events, and sends invitations—all triggered by your single conversational message.
The underlying technology uses advanced language models to understand user intent, translates conversational requests into structured API calls, and manages multi-step workflows across applications. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) standard enables Refinder to securely access application data while maintaining user permissions and organizational access controls throughout the execution process.
Use Cases
Refinder’s conversational automation serves organizations across multiple business functions and team sizes:
- Meeting and calendar management: Eliminate scheduling complexity by booking meetings through chat. The AI agent checks all attendees’ calendars, identifies available times, and sends invitations—turning calendar coordination from a multi-step process into a single natural language command.
- Project and task management: Update Jira tickets, create new tasks, assign work, and track progress directly from Slack or Google Chat, keeping project management current without switching applications or maintaining separate update practices.
- Enterprise data and knowledge search: Retrieve information scattered across Google Drive, Notion, Confluence, and other platforms instantly through conversational queries, with the AI providing summarized answers citing source documents and relevant context.
- Workflow automation and approvals: Automate repetitive business processes including expense approvals, access requests, onboarding workflows, and routine notifications, with transparency and audit trails for compliance and governance.
- Team synchronization and reporting: Generate automated daily standups, weekly reports, sprint summaries, and project updates through conversational requests, keeping distributed teams informed without manual compilation.
Pros \& Cons
Advantages
- Rapid deployment and setup: Get started in minutes through simple chat authorization in either Google Chat or Slack, with no complex configuration or technical expertise required. Begin automating processes immediately without infrastructure prerequisites.
- No coding required: Automate sophisticated workflows using natural language conversation. Users describe what they want accomplished in plain language rather than writing code or configuring complex no-code tools.
- Increased team productivity: By automating routine tasks (scheduling, updates, notifications, reporting) directly within communication platforms, teams reclaim time previously spent on context switching and manual coordination.
- Unified workspace experience: Consolidates work execution, information retrieval, and team communication in your existing chat platform (Google Chat or Slack), eliminating the need to switch between applications for common tasks.
- Multi-application integration: Connects to a broad ecosystem of 80+ enterprise tools through MCP standard, enabling complex cross-application workflows orchestrated from conversation.
- Personal and team scalability: Deploy personal agents for individual productivity or team agents in shared channels for standardized processes, supporting both individual contributor and organizational workflow needs.
- Enterprise-grade security: Implements workspace-level role-based access control (RBAC), OAuth authentication, and maintains organizational permission boundaries, ensuring sensitive data and processes remain restricted appropriately.
Disadvantages
- Platform limitation: Currently functions within Google Chat and Slack only. Teams using alternative communication platforms (Microsoft Teams, Discord, or other chat systems) cannot access Refinder’s capabilities.
- Integration breadth still developing: While supporting 80+ applications, some niche enterprise tools may lack integration. The platform continues expanding supported applications but won’t connect to every tool a large organization uses.
- Learning curve for complex automation: While simple tasks require only conversation, creating sophisticated, multi-step workflows may require some trial and experimentation to refine triggers, conditions, and execution steps.
- Early-stage platform maturity: Launched in November 2025, Refinder is new to market. Users may encounter occasional limitations, features in development, or evolving capabilities as the platform matures and expands.
- Dependency on application permissions: Refinder operates within the permissions and access controls of connected applications. Overly restrictive organizational policies in connected tools may limit automation capabilities.
How Does It Compare?
In November 2025, workflow automation options fall into distinct categories, each with different approaches to reducing manual work and increasing team productivity.
Traditional event-driven automation platforms like Zapier and Make excel at connecting applications based on triggers and actions across their extensive integration libraries. Zapier offers over 7,000 integrations with an intuitive interface ideal for beginners, though it limits automation complexity on basic plans. Make provides visual workflow building with more powerful data transformation capabilities and unlimited workflow steps, appealing to users with more complex automation needs. Both require explicit setup outside your communication platform—users must configure workflows separately and rely on external notifications of results, creating a fundamental disconnect between work execution and team communication.
Slack’s native Workflow Builder (now enhancing with AI-powered generation) and Google’s native Chat automation options provide simple event-based automation directly within these platforms, but typically handle only basic processes. These native options require setup within the platform itself but offer limited capability for complex business logic.
Slack’s new Agentforce agents, launched at Dreamforce 2025 (October 2025), embed AI agents directly in Slack with role-based specialization (Sales agents, IT Service agents, HR agents). This represents a broader platform strategy but requires significant Salesforce infrastructure investment and is primarily available to Salesforce customers, positioning it as enterprise-specific rather than universally available.
Refinder occupies a distinct category: AI agents purpose-built for team workflow automation within existing chat platforms, using conversational interface for both configuration and execution. Unlike Zapier and Make (which require external setup and notification workflows), Refinder enables users to describe automation goals in chat and see results within the same conversation. Unlike Slack’s limited native automation or Google Chat’s code-dependent approach, Refinder provides sophisticated multi-application workflows through natural language. Unlike Slack Agentforce (which requires Salesforce ecosystem), Refinder operates independently with choice of Google Chat or Slack, and works with any connected application rather than just Salesforce tools.
The key differentiator is conversational execution: teams don’t need to switch contexts between their work execution platform (chat) and their workflow automation tools. Complex processes are triggered and monitored from within the communication platform where work coordination happens, reducing context switching and creating a unified workspace experience.
Zapier and Make remain superior for organizations building extensive, complex automation infrastructure across highly specialized applications or those needing integrations with niche platforms. Slack Agentforce suits Salesforce-centric organizations. For teams prioritizing rapid automation deployment from within existing communication platforms using natural language, with built-in enterprise security and multi-application workflow orchestration, Refinder’s conversational approach represents a fundamentally different—and for many teams, more productive—model.
Final Thoughts
Refinder addresses a specific productivity challenge: the friction cost of manually coordinating tasks across disconnected business applications. By enabling task execution and information retrieval directly within team communication platforms through conversational commands, it collapses the context-switching overhead that characterizes modern work.
The platform’s launch in November 2025 positions it within a broader market shift toward conversational AI agents for workplace automation. Unlike earlier automation tools that required external setup and monitoring, Refinder treats your chat platform (whether Google Chat or Slack) as the command center for work—a model that aligns with how distributed teams actually coordinate daily.
The platform’s focus on Google Chat and Slack, the most widely adopted team communication tools, reflects a pragmatic approach to market adoption. Support for 80+ enterprise applications enables broad organizational applicability across different technology stacks.
For teams seeking to reduce manual coordination overhead, accelerate task execution, or simply reduce the number of applications they must actively use during their workday, Refinder’s conversational automation model offers tangible productivity gains. Early adoption may require some workflow refinement as the platform matures, but the core value—executing complex business processes from within your team’s communication platform—represents a meaningful step forward in how technology can reduce friction in collaborative work.