#16 Dennis Mortensen, x.ai, AI scheduling

Summary Dennis Mortensen and I discuss x.ai, an AI personal assistant for scheduling meetings. Details Dennis and I discuss his background, traditional analytics products, predictive analytics; x.ai, it “schedules meetings”, how it works, invisible software, people don’t have control panels or sliders, tuning Amy multiple calendars; humanizing Amy, pain does not have a syntax, democratizing having a personal assistant; scheduling nirvana, Amy work with Emily, elastic calendar; human speed; psychology of Amy, Amy is not an “it” and does not have features, Amy has skills and receives education; invisible interface; accepting Amy and stigma around AI PAs; is Amy dehumanizing, or is a control panel dehumanizing; why now for Amy, 1019 meetings and 672 reschedules in one year, not Turing ready; no app, maybe location awareness; audience of 87 million US knowledge workers, spreading word; when it will be available, thousands of users, tens of thousands meetings a day; backend, improving understanding, context; Amy’s truth, cultural differences, irony; architecture, no scaling problem, AWS, Scala, mongo; data and privacy; future of x.ai, flights, hotels, other languages, voice integration.