Every company these days wants to figure out how to automate people’s work with AI. Turns out, AI can also help with that.
Founded in 2019, San Francisco- based startup Scribe makes a browser extension that sits on employees’ laptops, recording their screens and silently watching them work. Along with giving businesses insight into the steps involved in repetitive tasks, Scribe’s AI software can then automatically generate step-by-step guides and tutorials that clearly explain how different teams operate, complete with annotated screenshots and click instructions.
That’s also perfect for teaching AI agents how people work: what to do, which tools to use and how to handle different tasks on their own. “Companies are realizing we need to make our organizations legible to humans and agents,” says CEO and cofounder Jennifer Smith.
Today 80,000 customers including LinkedIn, HubSpot and T-Mobile use Scribe’s guides to train new employees on complex workflows and zero-in on inefficiencies, helping them save time and money. (Teaching agents, rather than humans, is still nascent.)
Thanks to Scribe, $1.2 billion (2025 revenue) marketing software firm Klaviyo learned that sales reps were spending hours switching between different tools to find information about prospective customers, a process that can be automated in the future. At another company, Scribe found that customer service representatives had to go through 20 different tools like email and Teams to answer a customer’s simple question: “Where is my order?” At a third, Scribe discovered that support reps were spending more than 400 hours copying and pasting between different systems.
The AI wave has served as a tailwind for Scribe’s growth. The company announced Monday that it crossed $100 million in annualized recurring revenue in April, about $8.3 million in revenue that month. More than 6 million employees have Scribe’s app on their laptop, and businesses pay anywhere from a $20 subscription to five- to seven-figure contracts. Some 600,000 organizations use the app’s free version, which captures work people do in a browser, whereas the paid plans can record desktop applications too. The startup’s AI models, built on top of OpenAI, Anthropic and Google’s systems, have recorded and analyzed 15 million different workflows like onboarding new hires, managing tickets or responding to customers, and observed how people are working across 40,000 business applications. The San Francisco-based startup hit a $1.3 billion valuation after raising a $75 million Series C round in November.
The startup’s roots go back to Smith’s consultancy days. Working as a business analyst at McKinsey more than 15 years ago, Smith realized most companies had a limited understanding of the actual work — the clicking, typing and copy-pasting across different applications — employees spent hours on.
The way to learn what people were doing so their bosses could make them more efficient was even more painstaking. Smith would pull up a chair behind an employee and peer over their shoulder, taking notes on exactly what they did, and interview dozens of employees who’d found better ways to use tools. “Institutional know-how lives in people’s heads,” she says. “It’s arguably [a business’] most important asset and it’s not something you actually own or can see or use.”
Smith was convinced there was a better way than hovering over an employee’s shoulder (awkward as it was). The answer: AI. In the summer of 2019, she teamed up with cofounder Aaron Podolny to start Scribe. The company offers two products, Scribe Capture, which records workflows and converts them into guides, and Scribe Optimize, which analyzes all that data to find inefficiencies to improve. The app only captures data from work applications like Slack and Salesforce, Smith claims. It anonymizes the data by identifying trends at a team-level rather than monitoring individual activity, like where employees spend most of their time. “It’s built to measure the work, not the workers,” Smith says. (That means Scribe isn’t watching if people are watching YouTube during their lunch break, for instance, though you’ll have to take their word for it.)
Tools that track and record employee’s work to increase productivity have been around for decades, but so-called “bossware” exploded during the pandemic — to workers’ great chagrin. Thanks to AI, such tools have only become more prominent and sophisticated, tracking everything from keystrokes and mouse movements to clicks. In late April, Meta told thousands of employees that it would track everything they do on their computers to train AI models on their day-to–day tasks. Angry employees called it a privacy violation and a “callous” decision, The New York Times reported. With tech giants like Meta slashing thousands of jobs to balance the billions they’re spending on AI, such surveillance tools clearly could be used to find roles to cut.
Scribe customers insist that the application isn’t to surveil workers, rather to deeply answer the question “what do we do here?” and figure out how it can be improved. Klaviyo senior director Glenn Vanderlann says ensuring transparency among employees on what is and isn’t tracked by the app has been key to rolling out the tool. “If somebody’s going to go out to ESPN.com …we don’t care. Like, that’s fine. We’re not going to trace that,” he says, adding that employees have the option to opt out.
Mike Dauber, a general partner at Amplify and investor in Scribe, compares what Scribe is doing for thousands of firms in the AI era to how human drivers initially drove Waymos across San Francisco to map out the city, before rolling out driverless cars years later. “You can’t automate things if you haven’t mapped it first,” he says. But of course, Waymo doesn’t need those drivers anymore.
