Why We Built izi

Bzzzz… “In a meeting… Total waste of time! Two more to go,” Vat texted.

Sharjeel, unsurprisingly, was also in a meeting when he replied.

“Lol, same here!” As he typed his response, a co-worker interrupted everyone.

“Wait, can you say that again? I’m trying to take notes but everyone’s speaking so fast!”

“Ugh,” Sharjeel sighed.

Later that night, the two flatmates, Vat and Sharjeel continued their conversation.

“I’ve got pretty good memory, but I’m in so many meetings there’s no way all the information can stay with me for more than a day or two. Even if I take notes I always end up missing something” Vat said. “And I waste so much of my day on unimportant stuff.”

Earlier that month, Sharjeel had been at the CES, where all the major auto manufacturers were showing off intelligent voice assistants for drivers. As they talked, Sharjeel got an idea.

“What if we created an intelligent assistant. It could take notes, annotate images, set call reminders, transcribe audio, answer do all those boring but important things would free your focus to concentrate on what matters.”

That was the first of many conversations. Slowly, conversations led to tinkering. Tinkering led to prototypes, and a few months down the line both Vat and Sharjeel felt sure they were on to something.

They had built an AI-enabled workflow tool for human intelligence tasks. The premise was that the user would define how they wanted the “boring but necessary” tasks done once, and then the algorithm would take over to execute them routinely. Over time, it would learn, making changes to the workflow depending on how people reacted to and used the output. Sharjeel and Vat put out over 16 different AI-driven use cases to streamline work. People bought the service, but didn’t use it as often as Sharjeel and Vat had hoped. That bothered them…

One day in late 2016, Sharjeel was having dinner with his father and wanted to share what he has been doing, to ask for feedback and advice.

Sharjeel’s dad was responsible for running free and fair elections in India, and managed more than 5 million people at the peak of election season, so he knew a thing or two about organizing teams and workflows for peak productivity.

Instead of a scientific answer, Sharjeel’s father told him a simple story about when he was a grad student in the UK. Sharjeel was just 10 years old and spent a lot of time alone. His dad spent nearly all his time the university typing up page after page for his coursework on a shared electronic typewriter. His mother worked a day job. Then one day, his dad decided to buy a computer called the PC-XT with the money he had saved up, and suddenly he had more time to spend with his family.

Sharjeel’s dad explained that the PC-XT, a new technology, saved him so much time that he previously wasted typing and retyping documents, that he finally had time to be present in Sharjeel’s life the way he always wanted to be. “Small change, big difference. That’s what you want to go after,” he said.

“Solve a human problem,” Sharjeel’s father explained. Help your clients overcome bottlenecks that cause them to lose the most time. If people save time at work, they would have more time to spend with the people they care about and do the things they love — and that is a product worth building.

Sharjeel and Vat took that advice and continued on, focusing on efficiency. They started interviewing users to find out where they felt the most frustration when it came to their work life. Where were they losing the most time?

Users told Vat and Sharjeel what they most wanted was to improve voice based collaboration, especially meetings. “The most knowledge exists in the conversations we have but there’s no good way to capture that knowledge and use it for good,” one user remarked.

So Sharjeel and Vat took everything they had learned about AI and focused their goals on what their customers needed most: an intelligent assistant that helped people be fully present in meetings, without worrying about taking notes. An assistant that would capture every detail, help users review the meeting in a matter of minutes, deliver insights about the participants and content, and make it easy to access and share meeting notes.

An assistant that gave every day professionals superpowers to overcome collaboration challenges emerging from meetings. And, izi was born!

By the time izi was in closed beta, the effectiveness of the product, along with the fact that izi solves the most time-consuming issues at work, led to immediate positive responses.

Now, several dozen companies, including industry leaders like Box and LinkedIn, have small teams that are already saving time with izi.

Every day, more workers at these and other companies sign-up for izi to get more value from their meetings, to reclaim focus and time, and do their best work. We at izi hope we can help our users be successful at work and also have time for the things they love outside of it.

Are you ready to be more productive? Are you ready to make time for the things that matter? If you are, you’re ready for izi!