Every product ends up with a character in it. Ours has been floating in the bottom corner of the platform for months: a small three-tone glyph that answers questions about projects, invoices and tickets. It had rules, a voice, and a job. It did not have a name, which turned out to matter more than we expected.
Why a name at all
Nobody says "the assistant" out loud. They say "hey, can you check my invoice" and wait. Without a name, the thing stays a feature — something you operate. A name makes it a counterpart, something you ask.
That difference shows up in how people use it. Named assistants get short, direct questions. Unnamed ones get formal, careful instructions, as though the person is filing a request. We want the first kind of conversation, because the questions people actually have during a workday are short and direct.
What "Tomo" means
Tomo is Japanese for friend, or companion — someone who is alongside you rather than above you. It is two syllables, it survives being typed in a hurry, and it does not sound like a product tier.
We also liked that it is a name, not a label. Hermes, the assistant, the copilot: those describe a function. Tomo describes a relationship, which is closer to the truth of how it gets used.
What Tomo actually does
The name is new. The job is the same, and deliberately narrow:
- It reads your own work. Your projects, your invoices, your open tickets. It holds no other organization's data and cannot be talked into fetching it.
- It answers from records, not guesses. If a figure is not in your data, Tomo says so. It never invents an invoice number, a project name, or a balance.
- It asks before it acts. Raising a support ticket or adding a paid service to a project both happen only after you confirm them in the panel. Tomo proposes; you decide.
- It escalates to people. Anything outside its reach ends the same way: a ticket to the team, with the context already attached.
Staff get a version that can read the operational picture — the queue, the exceptions, the day's numbers. Members get a version narrowed to their own organization. Same character, different window onto the platform.
On naming things that change
We have released a lot this year without ceremony. This one gets a post because a name is the point at which a feature becomes part of how the company talks about itself — and because we would rather tell you what Tomo is now than let you discover it mid-question.
It is the same companion. It is just easier to call on.
