Knowledge is necessary. Execution is the work.
Dust is a knowledge-assistant layer for enterprise — connects your docs, answers questions, surfaces context. Spawnlabs goes further: the agent does the work, builds the tools, and ships the artifacts — using that knowledge as input.
Dust is a retrieval + assistant layer: your company's knowledge made queryable. Spawnlabs is a work layer: knowledge is the input, completed work is the output — with the tools and apps the work produces.
When Dust is the right choice
- Your core need is knowledge retrieval across scattered docs — a smart internal search layer.
- You want a chat assistant your team opens to ask questions about the company.
- You care about connecting many data sources into one queryable interface.
When Spawnlabs is the right choice
- You want the agent to execute work continuously, not just answer questions when asked.
- You want the agent to build dashboards, CRMs, and apps that ship alongside the work.
- You want encoded per-person expertise — not a firm-level assistant.
- You need scheduled, event-triggered, background execution — not chat-on-demand.
Concrete example — a consultant's client engagement
With Dust: ask 'what do we know about this client's industry' → returns cited snippets from your firm's past decks. Useful. With Spawnlabs: the consultant's agent pulls from the same sources, builds the market benchmarks dashboard, drafts the deck in your firm's template, ships a microsite for the client to review work in progress, and tracks the engagement's workstreams. Knowledge in, completed work out.
Things people ask before switching from Dust.
Switching from Dust? Start with one workflow.
Encode the process that eats the most hours. See what an agent does with it in your first call.