Celeste, an AI customer service agent for email and live chat, launches with a pledge of the greater of 5% of revenue or 70% of profit to workers AI replaces.

If we want things to be different, we have to do things differently.”

— IMCeleste

AUSTIN, TX, UNITED STATES, August 2, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — IMCeleste today launched Celeste, an AI customer service agent for email and live chat, alongside a commitment to direct the greater of 5% of annual revenue or 70% of annual profit to workers displaced by its software.

The commitment, called the Dividend Standard, includes a revenue floor intended to make payments possible even while the company is young or unprofitable. Unlike conventional profit-sharing pledges, it applies from the company’s first dollar of revenue.

The argument behind the pledge is economic rather than moral. The worker a company automates was also somebody’s customer, and every paycheck that disappears takes its spending with it. Repeat that across enough of the economy and the automators eventually run out of customers. The company’s mission page also argues that universal basic income cannot fully absorb the shock because the taxes that fund it depend heavily on wages.

“Everyone who earns a paycheck also spends one,” said IMCeleste’s Lead Architect. “The easy thing is to keep the profits, and that is what almost every company will do. If the gains keep piling up in the accounts of a handful of AI providers, the economy runs into structural problems, and fast. It is not philanthropy. It is math.”

The company’s structure is designed to support the promise. IMCeleste is bootstrapped, with no outside investors, because a commitment to route most of the value away from shareholders is difficult to maintain with a cap table expecting the opposite. Its investor note calls the company “close to uninvestable” by conventional measures. IMCeleste is actively soliciting industry feedback on the Dividend Standard, but the core commitment is in place: the lion’s share of the profits generated by its software will flow back to the people it replaces.

Celeste is trained like a human hire, using a team’s past replies, the documents it provides, and the corrections it makes along the way. When a policy changes, her answers change with it.

The core AI safety principle of the product ensures that Celeste must earn autonomy through a series of observable probationary stages within a company’s support workflow. Every support topic begins in Practice mode, where her drafts appear beside the replies the human team actually sends and nothing she writes reaches a customer. When her performance on a topic satisfies the owner, that topic can move to Co-pilot and then to Autonomous. A single control for each topic sets her mode, the confidence required before sending, and how far she can act. The owner can adjust thresholds at any time or return every topic to Practice with one button.

Celeste combines generative AI with deterministic software controls. Her boundaries are written in plain language but enforced by conventional code. An owner can enter limits such as “ask me first for refunds over two hundred dollars” or “never refund an order older than thirty days.” Software-enforced controls prevent the agent from overriding those limits, and any unclassified risky action is held for a person to review.

Celeste can also take action and resolve issues rather than merely replying with information. Connected to the API or MCP systems a business already uses, she can, for example, look up an order, check whether it qualifies, and take an action within the limits set by the owner. Every reply keeps its receipts, including the sources she used, her confidence level, and the decision she made.

At the time of launch, Celeste answers email forwarded from Gmail, Microsoft 365, or any provider that supports forwarding, as well as live chat through a one-line website embed. A live admin demo and free trial are available at app.imceleste.com/demo. The full Dividend Standard is available at imceleste.com/mission.

About IMCeleste

IMCeleste was built in Austin, TX by Evenstar Services LLC. Celeste is an AI customer service agent for email and website live chat, and commits the greater of 5% of its revenue or 70% of its profit each year to workers displaced by its AI. Contact: [hello@imceleste.com](mailto:hello@imceleste.com)

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