THE POWER OF AI IS CATCHING FIRE & HER NAME IS AMY ... powered by x.ai

INTRODUCTION

Inc magazine just published an article on 5 things you should do to save 10 hours per week. An artificial intelligence product by x.ai was listed first . The product is named "Amy," a nickname for artificial intelligence programmed to be a personal assistant for scheduling meetings. You interact with her like you would with any staff member at work. Read below a screenshot from the x.ai webstie to see how it works:

RECAP: No sign-in, no password, no download, all you do is Cc amy@x.ai just like you would an ordinary personal assistant. But Amy is extraordinary once she is copied in the email thread she takes over so you can focus on more important tasks. Amy Ingram is artificial intelligence designed to understand everyday language and she will have natural and human-like email messages with your clients to schedule your meetings. She is able to learn your personal scheduling preferences, so that date, time and location are being negotiated on your terms. You can train Amy by simply emailing her your favorite coffee shop, FB business page or that you don't do meetings on Friday afternoons (because you will be at Great Divide drinking the Hercules double IPA) She’ll remember your habits and efficiently message it. How did this astounding technology come about? We had to find out more so we visited with Dennis Mortensen the creator of Amy. He is the CEO of x.ai and we're geeked up over his company, the future of artificial intelligence and are head over heels in love with a computer generated woman named Amy.

THE DIALOGUE Jon Little: (visiting with Dennis Mortensen CEO of x.ai...) Hey Dennis, this is mind boggling stuff ! Picking up where we left off....Are you growing tired of people asking you if robots will replace humans ? Our feeling is that robots will make humans work more efficiently thus there will be numerous more opportunities for humans

Dennis Mortensen

There’s no doubt that AI will have a huge impact on the way we work. Intelligent Agents such as Amy will democratize access to something that use to be a luxury for the few. A whole host of agents (robots) will do jobs that no humans were even hired to do before. My general optimistic view is one where you'll see repetitive rule bound work (such as scheduling meetings) be taken over by robots and AI. With that, there will be a massive increase in productivity, as people will find much more productive ways to use those hours. And when human creativity is unleashed, we’d expect to see more products and services invented, and that means more jobs. Many of these will be entirely new jobs coming along with this new software paradigm. x.ai is a perfect example of this, where half the people on our team are working under completely new job titles. Jon Little: Tell us about Amy?

Dennis Mortensen x.ai makes an AI personal assistant who schedules meetings for you, Amy (or Andrew) Ingram. There’s no app, nothing to download. Simply cc’ amy@x.ai and she’ll take over the email conversation and negotiate with your guests to get your meeting scheduled. We have developed the first fully autonomous artificial intelligence meeting scheduling agent. Our aim is to democratize the personal assistant. Jon Little: Before AI became all the rage what was a good example of artificial intelligence years ago everyone might understand not just geeks?

Dennis Mortensen

Artificial Intelligence is seamlessly woven into our daily lives and has been for many years. Google relies on “AI” to power its search results; Facebook relies on “AI” to find friends in your photos; and, of course, AI gives Siri some of her powers. It’s everywhere, and we often don’t realize when AI is shaping and enhancing our experience.

Jon Little: I know this has nothing to do with x.ai but have you ever been a passenger in a self driving car? describe the experience ? seems fun and safe as long as the other vehicles are self driving too, wouldn't want to be in a self driving car surrounded by human driven.

Dennis Mortensen I sadly have not. I am a huge fan the self driving car future we are moving towards, though. Obsessed even!

We see some parallels between the challenge of building a self-driving car and building an autonomous AI agent that schedules meetings. For the Google Self Driving Car Project, Google had terabytes of traffic data and extremely precise geographic data, but to develop the Self-Driving Car they had to mount a camera and associated sensors on an actual car and start driving. Six plus years and two million miles later, the car is only just beginning to drive autonomously. In our case, we needed scheduling data, and specifically, we needed to see what communications between someone who’s scheduling meetings and an assistant looked like. We needed to model that exact set of interactions. For many of the problems AI is setting out to solve, the data doesn’t even exist yet, so companies (big or small) have to start from scratch to amass the specific data set.

Jon Little: What inspires you in addition to developing personal assistants and other AI solutions?

Dennis Mortensen I’m really excited about solar energy and the energy grid of the future in general. It’s certain that we will see our global dependence on fossil fuels disappear in our lifetime. Outside of the obvious environmental benefits, I can imagine all the good that will bring.

Dennis Mortensen on AI "When human creativity is unleashed, we’d expect to see more products and services invented, and that means more jobs."

Jon Little: What are your goals for 2017?

Dennis Mortensen We are gearing up to launch our Business Edition this month! It’ll allow our customers to easily onboard their whole team, with some extended Admin features to help them manage users, track analytics– all under a single invoice with a fair billing plan. There will also be some added features for Business customers; they’ll be able to host Amy and Andrew on their own domain and have full editing control over their signature. We’re super excited about the benefits this will provide for a whole host of teams and companies.

Beyond that, we’ll continue to train Amy and Andrew so that they can schedule meetings flawlessly. We’ll also extend their skills, and allow customers to further personalize their meeting scheduling preferences.

CONCLUSION

Jon Little : Where do you see the AI and virtual assistant space in 5 years?

Dennis Mortensen

In the next 5 years we’ll see many specialized agents come to market, and startups, rather than any of the tech behemoths, are likely to build them. You’ll be able to access these vertical agents by “employing” them via email or chat or some other convenient channel. These truly intelligent vertical agents will each focus on a single task and its flawless execution. Once you posit a small army of agents designed to take on individual tasks start to finish, it’s not hard to imagine a scenario in which part of anyone’s job is to identify which agents she should deploy and then to manage them well. People will finally be freed of some of the most tedious tasks, so they can focus on what they’ve actually been hired to do.