Seattle startup Read AI launched a new “Digital Twin” product that works through email and can help schedule meetings, answer questions, and keep conversations moving.
The AI bot, branded as “Ada,” builds on the company’s existing meeting and productivity tools. Read AI says it’s the largest deployment of a digital twin product to date.
Digital Twin enters a crowded market of AI agents and workplace copilots from giants like Microsoft and Google, along with startups that offer AI‑driven scheduling, inbox triage and autonomous task management. Read is trying to differentiate by centering the agent in email, tightly coupling it to meeting and document context, and offering enterprise branding such as a custom name and company domain for customers with 25 or more licenses.
Here’s how it works. Users cc [email protected] on a thread and can ask it to find time on everyone’s calendars, draft replies, or answer questions using context from their meetings, email, files, CRMs and other connected systems. Read says its platform pulls from more than 20 native integrations and, on average, about 10,000 documents per user.
For anything beyond scheduling, Ada “sidebars” with the user first, proposing draft responses and waiting for approval before sending them, and it must be cc’d on email threads where it takes action. The idea is to let the AI cover for you when you’re too busy or out of the office, while giving you veto power on anything sensitive or high‑stakes.
Read AI CEO David Shim likened Digital Twin to OpenClaw, an open source AI digital assistant tool that works with messaging apps and went viral this month. “What OpenClaw did for tinkers, Digital Twin brings to the mainstream,” he told GeekWire.
Shim framed the launch as an evolution from “AI assistant” to something closer to a software colleague that can act on your behalf. In internal beta, he said a quarter of user interactions with Ada were just to say “thank you,” a signal that people were treating the product more like a teammate than a tool.
He said the Digital Twin launch shifts Read AI from “a system of record for productivity” to an “extension of you.”
“This is the moment we change the way we interact with AI, from pull to push, where the agent acts on your behalf,” he said.
More broadly, Shim is betting that digital twins — and AI assistants more broadly — will proliferate.
“If I said internet access was a human right 20 years ago, I’d be laughed out of the room — today, it’s an expected value,” he said. “We believe that digital twins will be a human right, akin to internet access, in the next few years, delivering a level playing field when it comes to AI and productivity.”
Founded in 2021 by Shim, Robert Williams, and Elliott Waldron, Read AI has raised more than $80 million and landed major enterprise customers for its cross-platform AI meeting assistant and productivity tools. It has 5 million monthly active users.
