iWanna Makes You Wanna Tell Their AI Everything

Another product review from the near future, by TBD Insider.

The saying goes, “If only we knew what we know,” but it might be time to change it to:

If Only We Knew What We Want To Do.

iWanna is a cool, modern AI-based twist on the old knowledge management scheme. It’s based on a simple point of view: what you know is not as important as what you intend to do. iWanna does three things:

First, it mines your email, Slack, WeChat, and a growing list of easy-to-set-up integrations. Next, it uses artificial intelligence to extract what it thinks are your true intentions, things you would do if you could, and presents them to you in a stream of “iWanna’s” that will startle you with their insight into your psyche. Then it lets you select the ones you want to “tell the universe.”

And that’s where things get interesting. The “universe” is everyone else on iWanna. Soon after you start making your selections, you get two things:

1) Suggested matches of iWanna’s from others;
2) Offers of funding, support, help, collaboration.

My first question when setting up iWanna was, “Do I really want to expose all my personal communications to this thing?” But iWanna’s AI, as they say on their site, provides each account with a high-security personal data vault. Not even iWanna admins can access the encrypted info. And it only stores the classifiers and other AI metadata that inform the iWanna’s, not the original messages. Their use of SoverI’s self-soverign identity system (featured in an upcoming review) gave me added confidence that both my information and identity were safe and private to only me.

Once I was set up, I just worked as usual. The next day, I got my first message from iWanna with just two things it thought were my strong intentions. One was pretty obvious: “iWanna get more people reading my product reviews.” Yep, that’s true. The next one was so surprising and deeply personal that I’m not going to tell you what it was. I only chose to share the first one with “the universe.”

The following day, I got more iWanna’s, and now they were coming with “intensity scores.” Clicking on a score gave me graphs and tools to show the reasoning behind it. A few days later, I was stack ranking my priorities with iWanna’s control panel and feeding them into Asana, turning the top two into projects.

I wondered why I didn’t receive matches with others’ iWanna’s in the first couple days. It’s early days, and the company insists that they will only provide “highly salient” connections. After a week, I received just one — a product manager with a new product that needs more media exposure. That’s a pretty good match. To connect, we both had to agree to share details, and of course that’s when I had to pay the monthly fee. Standard match-making business model.

The company intends to follow the Slack model of getting a strong base of personal and “shadow IT” corporate users, and then offer the service to both small business and the enterprise. And if they get that far, iWanna could be a game changer. It’s one thing for a single person to get insights into their own intentions, but imagine a company of dozens or thousands of people knowing not only what employees want to do but to what degree they intend to do it. Is one iWanna an outlier from a brilliant but isolated genius? Is another getting airtime and strong language in the writings of people across the company?

As iWanna’s CEO, Wanda Williams puts it, “The intensity of employee intent is the potential energy of your company. iWanna will help you spot it, share it and release it. You get new initiatives, increased confidence in existing strategy, and new partnership opportunities.”

After experiencing iWanna’s uncanny insights into my own intentions, and its even more apt connections to resources that will help me see them through, I’m eager to see if she’s right.

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This story is fiction, based entirely on our fevered imagination of products and services that could be delivered to market based on current and emerging know-how — given sufficient resource and intent. Any resemblance to people or real products, either released or planned, is purely coincidental.