As the CEO of a startup, I’ve always tried to set aside time to get to know each new team member as they come onboard. As such, when I asked my Partner Eddie Arrieta when would be good for a team meeting and he told me to ask Amy, I was momentarily taken aback. Who was Amy? Was there a new intern who had slipped through the net?
It turns out that my memory still serves me. He was referring to Amy.ai, the new chatbot we were trialing to schedule staff and client meetings. Over the last year we have trialled and brought onboard a number of bot applications — AI powered software programs that utilize messaging to carry out a range of ‘personal assistant’ tasks.
Bots are hot right now. When investors such as Y Combinator, Greylock Partners and SV Angel start pumping funding into an emerging technology, it tells you that it is a space that you should consider moving. Over the last few years bots have been created to do everything from tell you the weather, manage your personal finances, to help your team communicate more efficiently.
Fortunately I spend much of the year in Medellin, Colombia, the ‘City of Eternal Spring’, so I don’t need help with weather forecasts, however our team has rolled out a number of bots to offer us a helping hand in various aspects of our day to day jobs.
Scheduling meetings and appointments
The illusive Amy Ingram is a chatbot created by x.ai, a startup based in New York. According to a recent study by Atlassian, the average employee can be expected to attend as many as 62 meetings each month, and playing email ping pong trying to organize meetings can become a real headache.
Our team tries to limit the amount of time spent in team meetings to one to two hours per week, but add client phone calls, and back and forth conversations into the mix, and setting up meetings quickly becomes a drain on productivity.
Now, whenever we need to schedule a meeting or call, we can simply CC amy@x.ai into the email chain. The bot then does all the legwork between all parties with different potential time slots based on their availabilities. When ‘she’ has found a time which is convenient for everyone, she sends us a calendar invite with a time, date and location or dial in number.
We have found this tool especially useful because our company has clients in different time zones all over the world, teams based in three different cities, and a flexible remote working policy. Using Amy has really cut the amount of time spent calculating time differences and trying to find times that work for everyone involved. Amy is here to stay, and I didn’t even need to take her for lunch to welcome her to the team.
Keeping up to date with media coverage on the move
As a marketing startup, our team needs to be up to date with breaking news, and be able to check media results for our clients in real time, even when on the move. I recently downloaded the Whatsapp bot Qeubot and have encouraged our account managers and editorial team to do the same too. Qeubot is new Whatsapp bot which is legal, free, and doesn’t require root permissions or have any complicated setup processes. But to get access to its news function — the part which we find most useful — costs a mere $1.69 on…