AI scheduling startup launches subscription for businesses | PCWorld – PCWorld

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Setting up meetings can be a pain, since they often require folks to send emails back and forth figuring out a time before finally sending off a calendar invitation to block everyones schedule. A New York startup called x.ai wants to simplify that with a helpful bot, and they just launched a product aimed at serving businesses.

The service provides users with access to x.ais assistant, which can go by Andrew or Amy Ingram, to automatically set up meetings with people inside a company and help schedule time with folks who work elsewhere. Its an extension of the companys existing service, which is built for individuals.

Both share the same core functionality: users can loop x.ais assistant into an email conversation by copying it on the thread, and the assistant will jump in to help figure out a time when everyone can meet. The assistant can analyze an email to identify parameters for a meeting, and then look through a users calendar to see what times work.

Once it has a time to suggest, the assistant will reach out to other participants in the conversation to gather their availability and book a meeting.

Business users get a few additional benefits: people inside a company can use the assistant to automatically schedule time with one another, without requiring any back and forth. Administrators will get a dashboard to manage and track employee use of the service, and companies will be able to customize the assistants signature and use a custom domain name for the email address needed to summon it.

While that all sounds lovely, the service comes at a high price: businesses are expected to pay $59 per active user per month. To put that in context, Microsoft's most expensive Office 365 Enterprise subscription costs $35 per user per month.

The good news is that x.ai wont charge companies for people who dont use its service to schedule meetings, even if those folks have access to it.

X.ai CEO Dennis Mortensen argued that its worth paying so much for the service because of the productivity gains that users receive from it. The companys hypothesis is that companies will see productivity gains from its service to offset the cost.

Theres also the question of security and privacy. In situations when x.ais automated systems dont understand input, the service will send human reviewers slices of an email to try and get the correct result. Those people are supposed to only see parts without context in such a way that would prevent them from seeing whats being discussed, but that may not be an acceptable risk for some businesses.

In order to use the assistant, people have to give it access to their calendars, too. However, Mortensen wanted to make clear that the companys business is helping with scheduling, and it doesnt resell user data to try and make a buck.

Theres also another benefit to users on the security side: the assistant is designed to protect the calendar of the person its working for by default, keeping them from being scheduled for meetings they dont want. It also wont give away information about a users availability to salespeople or other social engineers, like a human assistant might.

Right now, the assistant only understands English, so companies looking for other language support will need to wait for x.ai to add it.

The startup already has a handful of customers signed up, including venture capital firm Work-Bench, and Assist, another AI startup.

Blair Hanley Frank is primarily focused on the public cloud, productivity and operating systems businesses for the IDG News Service.

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AI scheduling startup launches subscription for businesses | PCWorld - PCWorld