Row, Row, Row Your AI

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Artificial intelligence assistants have become remarkably clever, but they can also have the memory of that colleague who asks what the meeting is about five minutes after accepting the invite.

Sure, ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini can remember some things, and you can upload documents to give them context. However, actual work tends to be scattered everywhere. One conversation is buried in email, another happened during a meeting three weeks ago, and that important document is sitting somewhere on your computer.

This is the problem Rowboat is trying to solve.

Rowboat is an open-source desktop AI coworker that doesn’t just give you another blank chat box to type into. Instead, it takes information from your work and organises it into what its developers call a “living knowledge graph”.

For the uninitiated, a knowledge graph sounds considerably more complicated than it actually is. Imagine drawing circles on paper. One is a person, another is a company, another is a project, and another is a meeting. You then draw lines between everything that is connected.

Your brain already does this. You know Rahul works for Company X, he is involved in Project Y and promised to send you something on Friday. Rowboat essentially tries to build a digital version of those connections.

AI with  memory

This memory is Rowboat’s party trick. It can take information from emails, meeting transcripts, Slack, and your conversations with the AI and turn it into interconnected notes about people, companies, projects, and topics.

More importantly, this information isn’t hidden inside some mysterious AI brain. Rowboat stores its knowledge as ordinary Markdown files on your computer. You can open them, edit them, back them up, or move them somewhere else.

This could be extremely useful if you juggle multiple projects. Before a meeting, for example, you could ask Rowboat what you last discussed with someone and have it pull together previous decisions and relevant information. You don’t have to explain your life story to the AI every single time you open it.
This is something of an open-source Claude Cowork, similar to how OpenCode is an open-source coding agent similar to Claude Code. 

More than a chatbot

Rowboat can also actually do things with all this information.

It has built-in work areas for things such as meetings, email, and notes, plus a browser that agents can use. Background agents can spring into action when something happens, such as receiving an email or finishing a meeting, or run automatically according to a schedule.

So, theoretically, you could have Rowboat prepare meeting follow-ups or organise information without manually asking it every time.

There are also more advanced features for people who want to disappear completely down the AI rabbit hole. Rowboat can work with coding agents and can even create small personal applications inside the software. For example, you could ask it to create a simple customer tracker using information already stored in your Rowboat knowledge.

The important bit is that you don’t have to use all of this. At its simplest, Rowboat can just be an AI assistant that has a much better memory.

Bring your own brain

Rowboat isn’t necessarily the AI brain itself. You can connect it to online AI models such as GPT, Claude or Gemini, or run local models using software including Ollama and LM Studio.

Running a model locally means more can remain on your computer and you don’t have to pay an AI company every time you use it, though sufficiently powerful local AI models require reasonably capable hardware.

Using an online model is easier and potentially more powerful, but information required for your request may have to be sent to that provider.

Installing Rowboat

Installing Rowboat is fairly straightforward. Head to https://www.rowboatlabs.com/ and download the program for your system. Install it, follow the instructions, and continue until you have configured it. You can link your mailbox to your AI provider and also have it on Slack.  Rowboat starts building its knowledge when you start chatting with it. 

Should you install it?

If you only use AI to occasionally rewrite an email or ask who invented the toaster, Rowboat is complete overkill.
The attraction is that knowledge graph. Most AI assistants expect you to repeatedly bring the context to them. Rowboat is trying to collect, organise and remember that context for you.

I also like that its memory consists of Markdown files rather than information trapped inside a proprietary service. If you decide to leave Rowboat, your notes are still yours. The trade-off is complexity. This isn’t quite as simple as opening ChatGPT and typing a question. Getting the most out of Rowboat means connecting models, services, and allowing it access to parts of your working life. There are a lot of moving parts.

However, Rowboat is far more interesting than another ChatGPT clone. It is trying to solve one of the biggest problems with AI assistants: getting them to understand the messy pile of emails, meetings, people, and half-remembered promises that make up actual work.

Considering I occasionally need my email search to remember what I did yesterday, perhaps giving the computer a better memory than mine isn’t such a terrible idea.

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