X.ai raises $9.2M to make virtual assistant Amy Ingram smarter
X.ai, the company behind Amy Ingram, an artificial intelligence that I have switched to for meeting scheduling (see x.ai is the best scheduling tool — er, assistant? — ever), has raised $9.2 million in a Series A round of funding. The round was led by FirstMark Capital, and attracting Pritzker Group Venture Capital and CrunchFund. Existing investors IA Ventures, SoftBank Capital and Lerer Hippeau Ventures all joined the round, as well.
Using Amy’s services — and soon, Andrew’s — is totally simple. You simply include Amy on the address line — or cc line — of an email. I usually do so by including her explicitly into the discussion, saying
Amy — can you set up a time to talk with so-and-so later this week?
And let her do the rest. She has access to my calendar, and knows that I prefer — for example — to have calls in the afternoon rather than mornings.
I basically act like she’s human. She does have a Linkedin page:
The company’s founder and CEO, Dennis Morgensen points out that there are 87 million knowledge workers in the US alone, and they are scheduling a lot of meetings, perhaps 10 billion formal meetings in American corporations alone. Even if each participant only took a few minutes each, hundreds of billions of minutes are spent scheduling meetings. The time and money savings are staggering.
The company has a team of 20 plus data scientists and AI experts working on the project, and the company is hiring even more in the New York City offices, which is one of the reasons the company has raised the new round.
At present, Amy require human intervention for any but the most simple scheduling tasks — which is in part why I have adopted a very direct and simple approach to using her. My hope is that she will become smart enough to start making airline and hotel reservations for me, and soon. And expense reports.
