Artificial Intelligence

Are Workplace Chats Becoming the Next Layer of AI Memory?

As workplace knowledge spreads across chats, AI firms are building systems that can structure, retrieve and preserve it over time.

Updated

May 11, 2026 5:24 PM

A messaging app on a phone. PHOTO: ADOBE STOCK

Votee AI, an enterprise AI company headquartered in Hong Kong, has partnered with its Toronto-based research lab Beever AI to launch Beever Atlas. The new platform is designed to turn workplace chats into searchable knowledge that AI systems can retrieve and understand.

The release focuses on a growing issue inside organisations. Much of today’s workplace knowledge now exists inside chat platforms such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord and Telegram. Important discussions, project decisions and technical information often disappear into long message histories that are difficult to search later.

Beever AI developed the platform to organise those conversations into a structured system for AI assistants. The software connects with Telegram, Discord, Mattermost, Microsoft Teams and Slack, then converts conversations into linked records of people, projects, files and decisions.

The collaboration combines Votee AI’s enterprise infrastructure work with Beever AI’s research around AI memory systems. The companies are releasing two versions of the product. The open-source edition is aimed at individual developers, researchers and creators. The enterprise edition is designed for banks, government agencies and larger organisations with stricter security requirements.

The release also reflects a broader shift happening across the AI industry. Companies are increasingly looking at how AI systems store and retrieve long-term knowledge, rather than relying solely on large context windows or search-based retrieval.

Earlier this year, OpenAI founding member and former director of AI at Tesla  Andrej Karpathy discussed the growing need for what he described as “LLM Knowledge Bases.” He argued that AI systems need structured and evolving memory rather than depending only on context windows and vector search.

Beever Atlas approaches that problem through workplace communication. Instead of focusing mainly on uploaded files, the system is designed around conversations that happen daily across team chat platforms. It can also process images, PDFs, voice notes and video files within the same searchable system.

The companies say the software is designed to work directly with AI assistants and coding tools such as Cursor, AWS Kiro and Qwen Code. Integrations for OpenClaw and Hermes Agent are expected later in 2026.

Pak-Sun Ting, Co-Founder and CEO of Votee AI  said: "Hong Kong has always been known for property and finance. Beever Atlas is proof that world-class AI infrastructure can emerge from an HK-headquartered company and be shared openly with the world. Every growing organization faces the same silent liability: conversational knowledge loss. Beever Atlas turns this perishable resource into a compounding organizational asset."

A large part of the enterprise version focuses on privacy and access control. The system mirrors permissions from Slack and Microsoft Teams so users can only retrieve information they are already authorised to access. Permission updates are reflected automatically when access changes inside company systems.

The enterprise edition also includes audit logs, encryption controls and data retention settings for organisations handling sensitive internal data. Companies can run the software entirely inside their own infrastructure using Docker and connect it to their preferred AI models through LiteLLM.

The companies argue that organising information is more useful than simply storing chat archives. Jacky Chan Co-Founder and CTO of Votee AI said: "The key technical decision was to treat agent memory as a knowledge engineering problem, not a retrieval problem. Structure beats similarity — a typed graph of who works on what is more useful to an AI than vector search over a Slack archive."

The software also includes protections against prompt injection attacks and systems designed to reduce hallucinated responses. According to the companies, the AI is designed to return “I don't know” with citations when confidence is low instead of generating unsupported answers.

As workplace communication becomes increasingly fragmented across chat platforms, companies are beginning to treat internal conversations as information that AI systems can organise, retrieve and build on. Beever Atlas reflects a broader push to turn everyday workplace communication into long-term organisational memory.

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Deep Tech

Macau’s Viral ‘Robot Arrest’

A humanoid robot being escorted away by police in Macau has gone viral online, prompting jokes about what some called the world’s first “robot arrest.”

Updated

April 1, 2026 8:55 AM

Macau police officer accompanying the humanoid robot. PHOTO: THREADS@BOXOF_CHOCOLATE

Police in Macau recently detained a humanoid robot after it frightened an elderly woman on a public street. The unusual encounter quickly spread online, prompting jokes about what some called the world’s first “robot arrest”.

On the evening of March 5, the robot was taken away by officers after the encounter triggered alarm among bystanders. Videos circulating on social media show an elderly woman confronting the robot on a sidewalk, visibly distressed and shouting that her “heart is pounding” while demanding to know why such “nonsense” was happening on the street.  In the clip, the robot raises both hands toward the woman after she lashes out in fear — a gesture many viewers interpreted as a sign of apology.

Shortly afterwards, two officers from the Macau Public Security Police Force were seen escorting the robot and a man believed to be its operator away from the area. An officer is seen placing his right hand on the robot’s shoulder — the same posture police often use when presenting arrested suspects in official photographs.

That scene quickly spread online, fuelling jokes about what some called the world’s first “robot arrest”.

Photos shared online show a humanoid robot with long limbs and exposed mechanical joints, built from a black metallic frame without an outer shell. In dim lighting, several commenters said it resembled a “moving skeleton” — a striking sight for pedestrians encountering it unexpectedly on the street.

Witnesses said the woman appeared severely shaken and an ambulance was eventually called to take her to the hospital.  

The incident also sparked discussion online about robots operating in public spaces. Some commenters argued that experimental technologies should be tested in controlled environments, while others said machines moving through public areas should have clearer designs or safety measures to avoid alarming pedestrians.

It remains unclear who deployed the robot or what purpose it was serving in the area at the time of the incident. Authorities have not released further details about the device or whether any action was taken following the encounter.