Meet Amy, your personal AI-driven scheduling assistant
As an entrepreneur, one common advice you will often hear will be “focus your energy, your money and your time on high value tasks”. That being said it is quite clear that the whole scheduling meeting task is a dreadful process for those of us who cannot afford investing $50k/year in hiring a personal assistant. Well, guess what? There is a New-York start-up called X.ai who is working on precisely this.
Their core product is Amy Ingram, a personal assistant that you simply have to cc’ in order to schedule your meetings. As soon as she is notified, Amy will work out the details for you, that is to say having the “ping-pong conversation” in order to find a suitable time and place for both parties and booking it on both agendas. Except that this time, Amy is not sitting outside your office, or not even outsourced to a poll of 300 staff in Manila. Amy is an AI-powered personal assistant, an email bot, in simpler word, a software.
One would argue that it is a very trivial application of recent breakthrough in the artificial intelligence field but it is a persistent and global issue. Surely, X.ai is not the first company trying to tackle this automation. There have been a certain number of apps, plugins, web services or extensions that tried to solve this over the past decade. Not only all had very limited success so far, but equally importantly in my opinion, X.ai is doing it the most elegant way.
X.ai is not a regular software company that offers you yet another convenient tool to record, track, monitor, sync your daily life. Amy is a pioneer of this upcoming software generation that fully takes over an entire process. There is no need to opening up an app or sharing contact details, Amy does everything by herself. In that way it is very close to the Google self-driving cars.
From a technical point of view, asking a computer to maintain a complicated human interaction is probably one of the greatest challenge out there. Not only X.ai IT team has to focus on a large segment of natural language to make sure the system actually feels like a human assistant but Amy has to go though a very large classification tree in order to extract properly the information from each emails it receives. I can only imagine how complex it can get when it comes to multi-participant meetings, and where information have to travel across several branches of various decision trees.
Finally from a data sciences point of view, the possibilities are also massive. By giving access to your calendar to Amy, we suddenly give X.ai data team access to years of meetings history log. They can look at your meeting distribution across the day, the week and the month, how long do you usually meet with such and such persons, where are your preference in terms of location, when do you like to have lunch, etc. All of these are a gold mine for them and they claim they will integrate these preferences when Amy will send invites on your behalf.
Picking up preferences is fantastic and integrating them in polite emails is great. But how real Amy really is? I can easily imagine that Amy is a hard worker assistant, she is very dedicated, she never gets angry and takes very little holiday but… she surely cannot pick up on body language. How many attendees can she coordinate per meeting? What about integrating social norms? What about figuring out the hierarchy, social dynamics and prioritizing meetings accordingly? What about the individual locations in order to manage potential time zone differences? Food restrictions? Being pro-active and reminding its managers that a meeting should be organized? Does it take into account the traveling time in between meetings based on the different locations? Based on my personal experience business organization is often like a chess game where CEOs would be “kings”, but it’s their assistants who are the “Queen” with all the power.
Nonetheless, some feedbacks tweeted by beta users are astonishing. Here are a few of my favourite.
What would be the next move for Amy ?
Mortensen, X.ai CEO, insisted quite heavily that sheduling meeting is their unique focus for the time being and that they want to nail it perfectly before moving on to some other tasks. “We are going to keep hunting this one problem. I want to be the company that once and for all resolve meeting scheduling. If I can schedule all 10 billion of those meetings, I am in very good shape.” Even so, I cannot stop imagining the possibilities around the corner. Restaurant reservations? Booking plane tickets? Does Amy have to be limited to business practices? Can’t it sync with Tinder for booking dates automatically? Will Amy able to pick up new communication channels and switch from one to another?
But I guess the real question that we are all wondering is: why did they pick up a lady name for their AI? This is so sadly common for such an innovative venture. Well, on the 2nd of March 2015, Andrew Ingram, Amy twin brother was born. In both cases their initial tells a lot about who they really are. I am sure that their will be a premium edition at some point offering no names limitation and that enable to move it to your corporate domain.
Is Amy a job killer?
Firstly, one would argue that preferring to interact with an AI rather than a human would tell a lot about the soft skills of C-level and VP level managers. It is a good joke but I personally do not see it that way.
Obviously Mortensen does not classify their first product as a job killer and takes on the commonly heard argument for such company where Amy does not fully replace a secretary but more likely, it automates boring and time consuming tasks out of their work assignment, enabling them to focus on the real added value stuff. Just like entrepreneurs… Surely I don’t remember seeing a job description for a PA that stops at “scheduling meetings”.
So does it takes job away or does it just upgrade current jobs? Will assistants around the world stand in a united voice just like cab drivers? I guess the answer is trickier than one would though. Mortensen is definitely right for the time being, as we are still years away from the movie “Her” where the whole operating system is an agent. I personally do not see anyone firing his/her PA, regardless how pleased they can be about Amy services, for all the pending situation stated above. But are the C-levels, despite being the early adopters, the real targeted audience? Don’t you think this service could be used by mid level managers who would not be eligible for having a human PA? Will the younger generation who grow up with Amy ever hire a human? Probably not. Even more widely, don’t you think that the 99% of the world population who does not have a personal assistant is on X.ai secret agenda?
