The Opportunity
Scheduling meetings can often be a time-consuming and frustrating experience, especially if it involves several parties. Everyone has a different schedule, time and location preferences and it takes a lot of time and effort to coordinate several people to set up a meeting.
Solution
X.ai is an AI personal assistant that will coordinate all parties involved to schedule a meeting, thus savings hours of time and a lot of effort. The AI assistant called Amy or Andrew will reach out to all the meeting participants and suggest a few time slots and location that would work for the user. Then it will have a few rounds of correspondence with the participants to find a time that they are all available, without spamming the inbox of the user. If it’s an in-person meeting, that bot will start to suggest places to meet and times to meet. If you’ve used Amy or Andrew before, they will start to learn about whether you are a Starbucks or Blue Bottle type, or if you prefer knocking one back with your contact at the local pub. Once the meeting is set, the bot will add it into whatever calendar you use.
X.ai is a conversational, smart bot which makes interactions with the assistant seamless and effortless (you just message it like you would be a real personal assistant). The service can be used both for business and social purposes.
Effectiveness and Commercial Promise
X.ai is taking advantage of a new trend on how people approach technology. Users are getting “app-fatigued” – they get lost in the endless number of new apps and rather than that heavily use a few “trusted” and most useful apps (users on average download 0 apps a month and spend 80 percent of their time in just three apps that they use). Smart helpers, on the other hand, are getting traction with the customers. The likes of Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Google Assistant and customer support bots for Facebook Messenger are becoming more and more popular in b2c and b2b spaces. So instead of creating a new app, X.ai makes standard apps that everyone uses smarter – in this case, email and calendar.
Currently X.ai provides three different subscription plans: Personal (5 meetings per month for free, but long wait list to get registered), Professional (unlimited meetings and no waitlist for $39 a month) and Business (all professional features, plus assistant on company’s domain, plus instant internal meetings for all users of X.ai inside the same company). It promises high ROI as it frees up time for workers to do their main job and results in the lower need of real personal assistants. The service is already used by the likes of LinkedIn and Salesforce.
The commercial viability of the service will depend largely on the precision of the algorithm that is used to set up meetings. If it works seamlessly, doesn’t make mistakes and doesn’t require human interventions, it will most probably be successful. If it makes mistakes and requires constant attention from the user, it is likely to fail.
Alterations and progress up to date
Additional features such as proactive suggestion of meeting, conference room reservation and even restaurant/hotel/flight booking can expand the functionality of the personal assistant even further, practically removing the need for a real-life personal assistant. The bot could even negotiate deals with hotels/travel agencies by collecting offers and then using them as leverage to negotiate a better deal with another vendor (more applicable for personal vacations). At the same time, even by doing one thing well the company can hit significant valuation and client base. Although the exact # of clients is not disclosed, founders refer to hundreds of thousands with a significant backlog. Since the inception, it raised $34.3M in total funding rounds, from such reputable investors as SoftBank Capital and Pritzker
Sources:
- http://www.x.ai
- https://www.theverge.com/2016/4/7/11380470/amy-personal-digital-assistant-bot-ai-conversational
- https://techcrunch.com/2016/04/07/rise-of-the-bots-x-ai-raises-23m-more-for-amy-a-bot-that-arranges-appointments/
- https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/x-ai#/entity
- https://smallbiztrends.com/2016/05/personal-assistant-x-ai.html
- http://www.businessinsider.com/review-of-amy-ingram-the-virtual-personal-assistant-from-xai-2015-7
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