Building AI personal assistants
In analogy to a rich person's PA
Many years ago, I worked for a wealthy real estate entrepreneur who owned a group of companies in southern France. He had a personal assistant. We were sitting in the same office space right next to the entrepreneur’s office.
I have worked on many occasions with the personal assistant and I have observed when she was assisting the entrepreneur. She was taking care of his calendar, emails, mail, meetings, personal and family travel, personal finance, and even the accounting of one of his hotels.
She has access to most of his personal information, even the most personal ones like email boxes, credit cards, etc. She has known him for more than 10 years and has very good knowledge of his personal preferences and patterns.
She was relatively well paid compared to the local standard, which represented certain costs for the company (~100K USD).
Until now, it is a luxury to be able to pay this amount of money in exchange for delegating the most time-consuming laborious type of work. It is often reserved for successful entrepreneurs, executives, celebrities, etc.
What if we can build AI personal assistants for everyone?
ChatGPT and similar products like Perplexity already feel a bit like personal assistants. They can answer our questions and search for information online. However, there is still a large gap if we compare them with the wealthy entrepreneur’s personal assistant.
For example, each year, the wealthy entrepreneur went with his family on an exotic trip and the personal assistant planned it for him and his family. She was given the destinations, dates and duration, a budget range, and a tour agency to work with so that the entrepreneur and his family would have a great experience.
So far, no AI assistant on the market could do this. ChatGPT or Perplexity can give a travel plan but they cannot book anything, and they don’t know the users well enough to act as a personal assistant. With the incumbent online travel agencies (Expedia and Booking.com), we cannot even chat with their websites to plan and book trips.
There is a huge space for this, with many open questions.
1, Will we have one general personal assistant like what a rich person currently has? Or will we have several specialized assistants for different subjects?
We could imagine Google or a startup developing a general personal assistant that could do many things, taking notes, managing calendars, organizing meetings, planning trips, etc.. It will have access to all our information and know our preference to do its job.
Or there is one personal assistant for a specific subject. We could have a productivity assistant help us take notes, organize meetings, and draft emails. We could have a travel assistant that plans and books the trips.
Apple is reported to close a deal with OpenAI and is planning to integrate OpenAI’s large language model in IOS18. This might give us a preview of what it feels like to have an assistant on our smartphones.
2, What will be the business model?
Most of us will not pay 100K USD for a personal AI assistant. It makes sense for me if we pay a monthly or annual fee. So far it seems like 20 USD per month is the magical number for AI product pricing (ChatGPT Plus, Perplexity Pro, GitHub Copilot, etc.).
Will any of the advertisement models be embedded here? I can hardly think so. It is hard to imagine: we have a personal assistant; we entrust it with our personal data, and it sells our data, or it tries to sell stuff to us whenever we delegate tasks to do. It is a conflict of interests — as our personal assistant, it should act in our best interests, not in the interests of other companies. So our assistants should be paid by us, not by other companies.
3, It will protect our personal space while creating communication barriers. How would that be?
When I needed to access the entrepreneur’s calendar to book a meeting, I needed to pass his personal assistant. That created a barrier. Certainly a good one as I need to have a valid reason to book his time. Otherwise, it would be rejected by the assistant.
So it would be similar to an AI personal assistant. I would be pleased if my AI assistant could reject all the spam calls that I am receiving from time to time and move the undesired sales prospect emails automatically to SPAM.
On the other side, it would create communication barriers and eventually, it would be my AI assistant that sends meeting invites and deals with others’ AI assistants.
It is an exciting time for startup founders in this space to build either general or specialized AI assistants. The bar is pretty high if we draw the analogy with the wealthy entrepreneur’s personal assistant, which takes years to know the person and years to build trust and complicity.