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Augmented Recruiting

x.ai as my secret weapon

A new AI-based productivity tool frees up hours of my day — and has turned me into a slavering fanboy!

As a start-up founder and executive recruiter, I have between 5–10 scheduled phone calls a day, as well as at least one or two coffee meetings and, frequently, a videoconference or two. Managing my calendar is a time-consuming, mindless and frustrating process — people flake, there are timezone complexities and I often forget to put the appointment in my calendar. I have complained to many of my friends that I spend half my day scheduling meetings.

Enter x.ai, your digital personal assistant. x.ai is designed to schedule meetings for busy folks, by taking away all the dreary e-mail ping-pong that goes with organizing a rendezvous.

Here’s how it works

I’ll exchange e-mails with someone and we agree to meet-up. I reply and copy-in the AI assistant (amy@x.ai — “Amy Ingram”) and tell it to schedule a breakfast. “Amy” then corresponds with the other individual directly by e-mail and, once a time is confirmed, sends an invite to both of us. “Amy” knows which breakfast venue I prefer. If the person reschedules, “Amy” will find a new time. If the person changes venue — also no sweat.

The result?

I get 30 minutes to an hour of my time back every day. And I get to unburden myself from an uniquely boring and repetitive task.

It’s pretty foolproof, which is vital when handling critical meetings: I’ve used all sorts of my goofy British-Australian vernacular (Sample e-mails: “Hey Amy, please shoot me an update on upcoming meetings”; “Hi there Amy, can you pop James on my calendar for a 10 minute call towards the end of this week.”) without any miscommunication; it handles misspellings and different timezones with aplomb.

It also seems to pass the Turing test with most of the people it’s scheduled on my behalf. Even though Amy’s e-mail signature clearly says it’s an AI assistant, I’ve had a large number of people tell me how efficient and charming my assistant is, assuming they were dealing with an unusually efficient carbon-based entity!

Other more savvy folks have glommed on and signed-up for the beta.

Minimal UI

The interface is joyous: because it’s barely there. There’s a starkly simplistic setup process on the web, but much of the ongoing product interaction is done via e-mail directly with “Amy ”. Want an update on the status of all your meetings? Just ping Amy an e-mail asking for the status. Found a new coffee shop you love? E-mail her and she’ll schedule coffee meetings there in future.

Some further additional (and somewhat unstructured) thoughts on x.ai:

  • Grey-collar workers should be deeply concerned about this kind of tech. There’s no question Amy does a large part of the job description of an Exec Assistant remarkably well and with unflappable good cheer. Similar tech like this could be handling most customer-support concerns, bank enquiries, travel planning, etc.
  • I can’t think of a productivity tool which has been so immediately impactful and where an early-stage product is so full realized. I love GDocs, Slack, Trello, shared calendars, etc, but all are iterative on earlier products and none seem to have as much blue-sky potential.
  • x.ai has to be the quintessential Tim Ferriss product — it’s a force-multiplier for anyone looking to outsource chunks of their professional life.
  • The e-mail based interface jibes with what Satya Nadella at Microsoft recently shared about the massive potential of AI chatbots. My bet is they become more prevalent than voice-based interfaces (Siri, Google Now, etc) even if they seem more prosaic — it’s presumably easier to parse text vs voice, plus there’s less room for misinterpretation.
  • When are they going to white-label the software? I’d love to be able to rename “Amy” and have her sit on our corporate domain — so it would look convincingly like a human agent. I’d pay ~$20 a month for this.
  • This has the workings of a monstrous, ultra-scaleable business —who doesn’t want to outsource mundane tasks to their own 24-hr assistant? I can imagine the developers adding a lot more functionality (Reserving a table at a restaurant? Scheduling for parties of 3+ people? Organizing travel to meetings?) to make it even more compelling.
  • The developers have executed well and have to be an acquisition target for MS, Google, etc. Deep integration into the Google Apps or Office suite would be killer…
  • “Amy Ingram” is a clever name — apparently an “N-gram” is a cornerstone concept in computational linguistics and probability.

Enough evangelizing: if you’re an entrepreneur, executive recruiter or anyone managing a busy schedule, I recommend getting on the x.ai waitlist pronto.

Hugh

CEO at Shortlist