The story
The story behind Deep Thought
The idea came in 2011, fifteen years before the platform: what is said should not be lost between the meeting and the minutes. Transcription turned out to be the easy step.
The idea is fifteen years older than the platform. It waited for the technology.
2011
The idea
Tomas André was running Visionutveckling, the telecom company he built from two people to 85 over seventeen years. In meeting after meeting he watched what was said disappear. What survived was whatever made it into the minutes.
The idea was simple: what is said should not be lost between the meeting and the minutes. The technology could not do it yet.
In 2011 I knew it should be possible. I watched how much information disappeared every day -- in meetings, in conversations, in the things people actually said versus what ended up in the minutes afterward.
Tomas André · Source 2011–2022
A decade of waiting
Speech recognition was too unstable, too blind to context and too impractical for real work. The idea stayed an idea.
The frustration built up over a decade. "Why can't the technology keep up with the vision?"
Tomas André · Source 2022
The technology caught up
Speech recognition became good enough to rely on. Collecting started the same year, systematically: summaries, voice notes, transcripts and preparations, from every format.
It was not a revolution. It was a solution to a problem I had been carrying since 2011.
Tomas André · Source 2023–today
Three years of building
Deep Thought has been built and used every day since, in production, in Sweden, on the founder's own material first: 14 files in 2022, 95 by the end of 2023, 324 by the end of 2024, 1,171 by the end of 2025 and 1,723 by April 2026 — summaries, voice notes, transcripts and preparations. The platform was built and tried on that material first.
This is not an idea I think sounds nice. I have built it and I run it every day.
Tomas André · Source
What fifteen years taught: transcription is the easy step
Recording and transcribing is something anyone can do today. It was never the point. The hard part is to gather everything in one place and extract from it deterministically — the same structure out, every time, from every source — so that one recording connects to the next, and what the organisation knows stops depending on who happened to take notes.
That is what the platform does, and why a single recording is only a small fragment of it.
A pile of recordings is not knowledge. It is raw material. Knowledge is when the material hangs together.The hard part was never getting hold of a good enough model. The hard part was getting what I already know to stop running through my fingers.Who is behind it
Dolutions AB owns and operates Deep Thought Cloud. The thinking behind it is Tomas André's; he writes it in the first person on tomasandre.se, and this site links to it rather than retelling it.
- Tomas André — thirty years of technology leadership, from Visionutveckling onward
- Mindtastic — in its own words: "AI strengthens what you already know" — training for leaders, document professionals, developers and governance
The name
In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Deep Thought is the computer that thinks for seven and a half million years and answers: 42. The answer is useless, because no one understood the question. This Deep Thought makes the opposite promise: every answer keeps the path that led to it, so you can always go back to what was said, by whom, and when.
The mark draws the product: a raw wave that swings three times, once for each level of ACI, and settles into one point — what is known across all of it. The three levels
Read the reasoning
- Everything I Say Ends Up as Text — the idea, 2011 to 2022
- The Rest Goes Stale — capture is easy; structure is the value
- Each Meeting Alone Drives Nothing — the structure of all meetings together
- Your Meeting Summary Is Worthless — why a summary alone makes it worse
- Text Is Data — why professional work is text
- The Plan Before You Leave the Room — from the conversation to a plan the same day
- Now It's All in One Place — whose place it is
- The strategy meeting that leaves no trace — Mindtastic
- Voice to structured meeting documentation — Mindtastic: structure instead of summaries