A note from the founder
Tom Butler
Founder, AiTomatic
We were born to talk, not to type. Yet every day we bend ourselves to a screen that was never built for the way we think. Sanctuary is my attempt to bend the technology back towards us instead.
People have been talking to one another for tens of thousands of years. Reading and typing are recent inventions, and our minds were never really built for them. And yet we spend our days bent over a screen, translating messy, human thoughts into the tidy boxes a machine will accept.
For a lot of us, and especially for those of us who are neurodivergent, that translation is the exhausting part. The thought is right there. Getting it into the phone is the hard bit. Sanctuary began with a simple wish: to spend less of my life serving a device, and to have it quietly serve me for a change.
I started AiTomatic because I wanted to blend the digital world back into the physical one, rather than keep living the other way around. It began as an AI agent company. But the further I went, the clearer it became that the part I genuinely cared about was not building clever agents, it was helping people.
That is the reason I got into software in the first place, and it is where my passion has always quietly sat. So I pivoted, and pointed everything I had at building software for neurodivergent minds. Helping others is simply where I am at my best, and I do not see that changing.
When large companies build software, they tend to build for an average. Neurodivergent people are rarely that average, so we get smoothed out of the picture, designed around rather than designed for. Accessibility tends to arrive late, as a setting to switch on or a panel to find, added once the real product is already finished.
It is rare to see an app where accessibility is the heart of the thing rather than something fixed on at the end. I wanted to build the opposite. Sanctuary is shaped from the inside out for the people usually left until last, and it turns out that when you do that, you make something gentler for everyone.
I do not think the answer is less technology. I think it is more honest technology. I will always reach for the latest tools, and I will always try to use them in the safest, calmest way I can, so the result feels more human and not less.
On your device and private. Quiet by default. Built to be used as little as possible, and then set down so you can get on with your day. That is what making tech more human means to me.
I will not stop being passionate about this. You do not get this passionate about a problem unless you have lived it, and once you have, you see it clear as day. I want to do what I can to change how this feels for millions of neurodivergent people, and to hand a little power back to those who have been quietly struggling with tools that were never made for them.
And honestly, if Sanctuary helps just one other person the way it has helped me, I will count that a success. Ideally it is many more than one. But one would already be enough.
Tom
Tom Butler · Founder, AiTomatic