Date: Mar 26

Transcript:

Them: That was not your turn. You should get a pedal so you're gonna have to pick up every magnet. If I were a man, where would I want to go? A couple options. One of them right here.
Me: Does it. See you there? Hey, Anna, it's Alton Wells. How are you?
Them: Yeah.
Me: I'm. Good. Thank you. How are you? I am doing fantastic rebast.
Them: I gotta keep that squeal in.
Me: I am in Austin. Texas. Oh, fun. I haven't been to Austin in a couple of years, but I've been a couple of times. It's a very fun city.
Them: Oh, my. Back to me. Don't mess this up for me, okay? That's not.
Me: It is, yes. Although I feel like I'm past my five years. You're past the fourth street era.
Them: Gonna work. It. Worked. Wow. Oh, no. She's in the spot. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.
Me: Yes. Oh my gosh. I saw the reasons, but stuff on not like I'm not the typical Austin resident. Yeah, I think it was more of my 20s when I was definitely. Now I'm 31, so.
Them: No. I'm in. The spot. At this point. I'm just trying to get all the magnets in now. If you put it down in somehow, some way, I put it down and we never pick up a magnet. This is my only other. Okay, so we have triple Luna. Here's the problem for you, grin. If I mess it up, Megan almost definitely wins because we followed a roll men first. Everyone knows that.
Me: I think it's a little more tame than I used to be, I would say. Anyways, super cool for you to reach out. If you don't mind, I'm so curious, how did you a find us be find that email?
Them: For the win. Gs.
Me: Very interesting. Yeah. I started. Going through chat. I'm just trying to get. A big picture idea of what tools were. Most of them are focused, honestly, on either, like kind of what you guys do.
Them: Megan, see if you can put yours down. Okay. It'll be a tie if you can put yours down.
Me: I feel like it's mainly having a virtual assistant. So somebody that's offshore somewhere in the US kind of taking.
Them: Bam. You didn't say bam. Thank you. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Oh, wait. That was not your turn.
Me: You know, like. Taking on that role and that's not what we're looking for. We wanted an AI tool to kind of. Do. That. And kind of. Test. How that. Looks in terms of not necessarily replacing somebody, but. Giving, you know, we have. Myself. And two other EAs for the executive team since like playing with it to see how we give them bandwidth. You guys should be doing the hard stuff. Well. And that's the thing. It's like there's. Just so much right now. That hopefully. I can take over. And it just is. It's, it's just more of a support, right? So it's like I want to see how we can incorporate the tool with our executives. There's. 12 executives, including our CEO. So. Not to. Say. That, you know, Who, you know, I know you guys know where beta. I just kind of, I'm curious. I didn't realize it was guys wearing beta until I. Was, I. Was like. All, you know, got the. Approval, was excited so I go in there by just her and I was like, oh, you have to like request access. So I didn't even realize. Yeah, we're gonna be turning the, we've been going just to give you a little bit of context. We've been going. And we're in beta now because we're just. We're making sure the onboarding process is fully automated. And making sure that the agent is working the way it's supposed to. We're gonna be probably opening up essentially direct sign up in the next couple of weeks. I would imagine towards the end of April we'll start, we'll take that badge off and people can just go and directly sign up for console. But if you don't mind, I'm so curious just to kind of double click on it, is it, were you like when you were searching chat? What is it that like you were looking to automate? What is the kind of like in your mind, you know, we're relatively early. We've been working on this idea since November, but I'm so curious. What it would like, what's the driving impetus? So the reason why I started this because. Like. It was. The admins. And had executives, you know, I realized that executives were doing like it all started because they didn't have enough support. And so I was, you know, went to the CEO. It's like, okay, are we gonna hire somebody else or saw it right now? We're going through a whole like AI transformation. How do we differently? How do we use the right tools to support us to go faster? So it's more like the timing was just like super aligned where we're just like shifting our mindset of how do we find the right tools to support us and to work faster and more efficiently. And so that was me trying to see like, okay, what are my options out there? And what I mainly saw was like, you know, there's obviously a lot of tools that do one thing and they might do it really well, but I wanted a more complete like full. ADA sort of. Totally. Idea that I was looking for. And you guys were the only one I could find that kind of had that whole like full, you know, like as a whole versus like, let's focus on, there's a lot of calendar management, task management, which. There really do much to be honest in terms of bandwidth. So it was that really initiated the search with bandwidth. Ah, that's so interesting. And thank you for saying that. You bring my heart a lot of joy. My co-founder and I, we regularly have this conversation. There's a number of tools out there that have solved certain problems really well. Cleaning the inbox, better calendar, better email. Scheduling, giving it an assistance. But our big idea is, you know, all of those things should be commodities of any sufficiently intelligent EA. And the way that we put it, like just to give you context, right now we're good at a handful of things. And on our roadmap is to become quickly really good at a much larger number. So right now what we do really well is we call it email triage. It's very simple. There's plenty of companies who are also doing this space. But every email that comes in, you can create a tag, custom tags. We have some that we set for you and it automatically just tags the inbox that gets set up. We also do notification based upon important emails. So if I have customer related tasks or if I have legal updates or anything like that, I get an iMessage. Of course we have an entire iMessage capability so you can, you know, iMessage it back and forth. It'll set reminders, priorities. And we're working on improving that experience quite a bit. And then finally we have email-based scheduling so, you know, you get an email for the assistant that handles all the back and forth for finding time. Obviously that's a big time sink. And then we also have the ability to do something called daily briefs where we go through your inbox, your calendar, any of your other connected tools. And we sort of say like, hey, this is what your date looks like. We're making a lot of visual improvements on that one. And so we think about those as skills and for us, you know, if you were to, as an actual EA, you know it is probably going to be impossible to ever actually fully replace a really good one. But we think that the admin burden of like how do you go from, hey, I have a receipt. And let's get it into Expensify and oh, I have a flight and let's make sure that like the travel plan is put together or any of those, we think that we can, we can get pretty close to automating. A large number of them. So I would love to have you try it out. I can send you the onboarding flow. It's really simple and straightforward. We're just finishing the setup and you can tell me what you think. Also the benefit of working with us right now. Is that. The handful of beta customers that we're working with were regularly taking in their feedback. To improve the experience. We actually just onboarded a fractional CFO of a pretty large consumer company that's in like the food industry. And so we're just kind of chipping away and making it as good as we can. And then for clarity are just you sort of know, I think it's important to understand where we're going. You know, we want to build this agent so that it has all the bells and whistles of iMessage and WhatsApp and slack, etc. Just like you would normally. But we're also going to be launching probably in the summer a full productivity suite. And what that means is, you know, just a better calendar email, personal CRM with the agent like strapped in. So eventually we would like to get to the point to where, you know, everybody gets a much better command center for doing their daily admin with the agents built in. And then we'll get smarter about how we configure all of the details around like, you know, who gets access to what and permissions, etc. Etc. Got it. Do you think. So? Are you saying. For example, we use. Like. Google fee, right? For everything we do. But. That what you're. Saying will replace. Like in terms of, oh God, no, no, no, no. We live on top of. We live on top of. So we connect. No, Never. In a million years do I ever want to build. A. School? No, not like that. Well, we. Think about it as layer. On top. So if you've ever used a kind of like superhuman or notion calendar or any of these other tools. You know, we. Think there's. Value. Long term. In doing it. But like the way that. What we're really focused on. Right now is just building out the agent. That has those capabilities that sort of work where you want it to work. Got it. Got it. Yeah. I. M definitely excited to try it. I obviously, like you said, You're never really. Going to fully replace somebody. Right? It's like how do we incorporate it to where it's making us more efficient? Trying to solve every single. Task that we have? You know. What about that I don't think. We're that close there, but we won't be one day maybe. Yeah, I think. For this product. The bane of my existence is the admin side of things. I don't like. Actually we built this because I'm personally terrible. At managing like expenses and receipts and travel and scheduling and keeping on top of my inbox. Like the little things. I'm personally terrible at them. And so, you know, I was like, well, maybe we could just build. An AI that can help us with this. So the hard complex things, you know, I have a couple of friends who are actually EAs themselves. And as you well know AI is ever going to replace like being able to understand the detailed nuances between relationships or the actual complexities and doing hard projects. But if we can get rid of like moving a receipt too expensify, I would love to help do that. So currently expensive travel because that is a big one in terms of just time. You know, like how much you kind of get into it. Obviously right now you can take a photo, send it, we actually use black cyber accident. How does. You had mentioned that it does help with receipts? How does it make that process better? How does it help you? So that one's on our roadmap. So we're going to be adding that over the next in this quarter. The idea is twofold. There's obviously email so if you get an attachment or a receipt that comes to the connected accounts and you know let's just say it's something. I have a lot of technical billing but if it's. Like. Let's just say it's a receipt for, I don't know, a dinner that somehow ended up in your email address. Ing that pulling that attachment down. And then like being able to agentically reason that it needs to at least be sent to brics. And unified like that's one. And then of course to modify that workflow so that if you just take an image, send it to console over iMessage. It can take that and process that receipt tag. Oh okay, hey, I see this is a receipt. Do you want me to attach it to either an expense report or do you want me to send it to bricks? I think there's a lot of work that needs to be done in terms of making that work really well. But that's like that's the idea that we're driving towards. Do you think you'll ever get to where like if you download a statement from a specific credit card from your bank and then feeding you to your software to then like reconcile between blacks and loose statements? I think. We could. So this is where like this is really like the benefit like we definitely could. Like I. Again we're early. But. In theory. Being able to handle the complex reconciliation of like hey we need to take a statement we need to decompose this statement and then we need to parse it into whatever tools. We're playing with this implementation of what we call skills where essentially like you define a set of rules and like how a certain thing should be done. And then the agent can say like oh I need to use these tools for this case. I'm able to detect when it's this case. And then handle it accordingly. It's a really common pattern in like coding tools but we have yet to see it materialize outside of the coding tools. Which is sort of where we're trying to bring that capability to the product. Well. That one would be really helpful. I. Am putting that on the list. I am putting that. On. And we of course to can work with these guys. You know our goal. Is we're just, I mean like the timing for you is like we're just starting our onboarding. And so. The benefit is of course we shape things and be cool. But it's also a little buggy in terms of like not being perfect. So I just want a level set. We think it's a fantastic tool. I do use it every day. But like to get the journey to fully fledged autonomous executive agent is we're working on it. Yeah, that makes total sense. So just to clarify though this kind of like it won't really mess or affect any of my emails right and just analyzing them and then bringing back reports or notifications. Like it's not going to accidentally delete something or okay. And same with like the calendar management. Like so we don't the one thing that we're very careful of is we did not. Right now give any autonomous delete capabilities. We can archive on request. So like let's say like one thing that I do is I get a lot of marketing emails, I text console. Go through all my marketing tagged emails and archive them. And we're setting up that as a routine. But right like the simple like for the email what we do right now really well and we can onboard you and you can just give it a run and we can go from there. But. For email. Like whenever an email comes in. Email gets read gets tagged. Gets sorted. And then if it's important it gets notified. So we're not archiving, we're not deleting, we're not doing any of that stuff. But we are reading the context and then setting a tag. So you will get little tags. Set on the actual inbox items themselves. But. I won't mark in the thread. No. It will not mark them as red. We're not saying it's not it's not moving them. We're not we're not moving them out of the inbox. Got it. Got it. Perfect. Because. That's. Perfect. Well. Sounds great. Thank. You so much for all. The context. And super helpful. And. You sound very. Excited. So. I love that. We're. Trying. When somebody. S passionate with. What they do. And so. I appreci. Ate that. You know that. Passion for. Fun. For your products. Thank you so much. You're very kind. Of so what. Would be the next step? So I will send you. A. Little follow up. It'll. Include an on. Boarding link. Probably expect it this afternoon. And then you. Can try it. Go from there. Follow the process if you have any questions you have my phone number. You can text me. You can also email me. It's like we're small enough right now to where that's easy enough to do. And then if it makes sense we can talk again about what it would look like to do a small trial deployed across the team. If there's things that you want and need we can plan for those and go from there. Okay, thank you so much. I really appreciate the time. Thank you. Thank you so much as well. I look forward to testing it out. Cool. Thank you. All right have a good day. All right. Fine.