KoltrixPromise Keeper: Tracking What Was Promised Over Email
Promise Keeper tracks every 'I'll send it Friday' in both directions, reminds you before yours is due and drafts a nudge for theirs. You still press send.
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Most dropped balls in a small company aren't dramatic. Someone wrote "I'll send the revised quote Friday," Friday came and went, and nobody noticed until the customer asked, politely, whether the quote was still coming.
Promise Keeper is the Koltrix agent built for exactly that gap. This post explains what it tracks, what it does with what it finds, and what it deliberately doesn't do.
The problem: commitments live in sentences, not in tools
Teams already have places for tasks: a project board, a CRM, a to-do app. The trouble is that a large share of real commitments never make it there. They're made in the middle of an email thread, in one line, often as a courtesy:
- "Let me check with our engineer and get back to you tomorrow."
- "We'll have the contract over by end of week."
- "I'll send the logs once the export finishes."
And just as often, the commitment runs the other way:
- "Our finance team will confirm the PO by Tuesday."
- "I'll share the API spec after our planning meeting."
Neither kind gets copied into a task list reliably, because copying it is extra work at the exact moment you're trying to finish the email. The usual fallback is memory, a starred message, or a personal spreadsheet that goes stale the first busy week.
What Promise Keeper does
The short version from our own product copy: every "I'll send it Friday" is tracked, in both directions. You get a reminder before yours is due, and a polite nudge is drafted for theirs.
In practice that breaks down into three jobs.
1. Noticing the promise
When a message in your workspace contains a commitment with a time attached, whether you made it or the other person did, the agent records it against that thread. The point is that you don't have to tag it, copy it or set a reminder by hand. The sentence you already wrote is the input.
2. Reminding you about yours
If you promised something, you get a reminder before it's due rather than after. A reminder that arrives once the deadline has passed is an apology prompt. One that arrives the day before is still useful.
3. Drafting the nudge for theirs
If someone else promised you something and the date passes quietly, Promise Keeper drafts a short, polite follow-up in the thread. It sits there as a draft. You read it, change it if you want, and send it, or you skip it because you already chased them on a call.
What it deliberately doesn't do
Koltrix agents propose; people send. There is no tool in the agent runtime that can send, forward or delete a message, so a drafted nudge can't go out on its own. That's not a toggle you could switch on by accident. The capability doesn't exist.
That matters more for follow-ups than for almost anything else an assistant might do. A nudge sent at the wrong moment, to someone who already replied on another channel, or with the wrong tone to a customer who's having a bad week, costs more than the time it saves. Keeping a person on the send button keeps that judgment where it belongs.
A few other things it isn't:
- It isn't a project manager. It doesn't assign work to teammates or replace your issue tracker. It watches the commitments made in email, because that's where they tend to get lost.
- It isn't a promise detector with a published accuracy rate. Language is messy. "I'll try to get to it this week" is softer than "I'll send it Friday," and the agent can't always know what you meant. Treat what it surfaces as a helpful list, not an audit.
- It isn't on if AI is off. If your workspace turns AI off, the agents stop. Summaries, drafts and commitment tracking all depend on sending message content to our AI providers, which we list by name on our security page.
How it fits with the other agents
Promise Keeper works alongside two other pieces of Koltrix that handle the "second email" problem:
| Agent | What it watches | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Promise Keeper | Dated commitments in a thread, both directions | A reminder before yours is due; a drafted nudge for theirs |
| Follow-ups | Messages you sent that got no reply | A polite nudge drafted after the number of days you choose |
| Daily brief | Everything above, plus what needs you today | A card on Home, and an email if you want one |
The difference between Promise Keeper and Follow-ups is the trigger. Follow-ups cares about silence: you sent something and heard nothing. Promise Keeper cares about a date someone stated. A thread can get plenty of replies and still contain a promise that quietly expired.
The daily brief is where it comes together. It lists what needs you, what's waiting on other people, and what your agents did overnight. If you only look at one screen in the morning, that's the one.
A worked example
Here's a typical thread for a two-person SaaS team, using a made-up customer at acme.example:
- Monday: The customer writes asking whether bulk export is on the roadmap. You reply: "It's partly built. I'll send you a beta link by Thursday."
- Monday: In the same thread they add: "Great. I'll send over a sample file from our side tomorrow so you can test with real data."
- Tuesday: Nothing arrives.
- Wednesday: Promise Keeper has a drafted nudge waiting in the thread, something like "Hi Dana, just checking whether that sample file is still on its way. Happy to test with it as soon as it lands." You send it as is.
- Wednesday afternoon: You get a reminder that your Thursday beta link is due tomorrow. You weren't going to forget, exactly, but you'd also scheduled two calls for Thursday morning.
- Thursday: The beta link goes out on time.
Nothing in that sequence is clever. It's the bookkeeping a very organized colleague would do, carried out on every thread in the workspace.
Tips for getting more out of it
- Write dates when you mean them. "By Thursday" is easier to act on than "soon," for the agent and for the person reading your email.
- Ask for dates. "Could you send it by Friday?" turns a vague intention on the other side into something trackable.
- Edit drafted nudges freely. They're starting points. A personal line about the customer's situation will usually beat the default wording.
- Use the daily brief as a checklist. Clearing the "waiting on you" section each morning is a reasonable definition of not dropping balls.
The same rule applies to every Koltrix agent: there is no tool in the agent runtime that can send, forward or delete a message, so Promise Keeper can remind and draft, and a person decides what goes out.
Key takeaways
- Many real commitments are made in single sentences inside email threads and never reach a task list.
- Promise Keeper tracks dated promises in both directions: it reminds you before yours are due and drafts nudges for theirs.
- Nothing is sent without a person clicking send. The agent runtime has no ability to send, forward or delete mail.
- It works best alongside Follow-ups and the daily brief, and it only runs while AI is switched on for your workspace.
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