The world of AI software is advancing at breakneck speed.
AI has begun to augment workers in the tech industry, providing massive productivity gains. According to the Financial Times, it's impacting earnings in the freelancing industry, with more sectors to come.
These productivity gains and the automation of various tasks will continue; AI is here to stay.
But if AI is here to stay, what should we expect from it as it continues to evolve, mature, and develop in the context of our workplaces?
In this article, we'll look at the next step beyond individualized AI applications, moving toward broader workplace integration.
We'll explore how simple AI systems will become an AI Chief of Staff.
The AI Assistant Ecosystem Today
The ecosystem today for AI assistants is broad and varied. There are existing tools that help with organization, reminders, or to-do lists that have chosen to append AI onto their services. However, they have kept their core offering at the center.
These non-native AI companies may have a difficult road ahead of them in holding on to their market share.
Of course, this is a whole different situation for the behemoths of Google, Microsoft, and other tech giants. These companies are embedded in complex enterprise contracts and existing workflows and are tightly tied to workers' existing competencies.
For Google and Microsoft, in particular, AI offers an opportunity to outcompete others. Both of these tech giants have large supporting developer ecosystems that produce third-party tools that connect and plug into the giants' platforms.
These tools typically fall into a few categories: one, providing small and low-demand additional functionalities; two, connecting those tools to other large software suites; and three, reprocessing data from those tools to generate value and feedback.
With the advent of AI, many of these companies will be challenged.
Productivity improvements in development could mean developing small features natively, and companies that process and repurpose data from big tech workspaces are left vulnerable and will survive based on the complexity of their reprocessing.
Microsoft has already launched very exciting-looking videos to promote its new AI capabilities and assistance across its platform with Copilot. Google will no doubt do the same, beyond its recent product demo of Gemini.
AI Note-Takers and Smart Calendars
So, what areas are we expecting to see AI help with most? Well, the initial features where AI has managed to provide significant assistance are in the world of AI note-taking and smart calendar technology.
Yet, the jury is still somewhat out on generative AI for producing content, both internal and external. It seems to be able to produce productivity gains and efficiencies, but it isn't yet at the point where it can successfully replace high-level content creation.
However, many low-level content creators, such as those in content mills or producing spam SEO content, will find that their gig is up.
AI note-taking, however, has advanced by leaps and bounds. It is now possible to host a meeting and receive accurate notes from an AI, labeled to the person who is speaking.
Beyond this, the AI can interpret those notes and provide summaries of important content, or omit unnecessary or unimportant content such as introductions or greetings.
In terms of smart calendar technology, much of it is currently the augmentation of previously existing systems, but some smart calendars natively using AI are beginning to emerge.
Xembly, for example, allows users to chat with an AI to manage their calendar. This AI acts as a personal assistant, giving them reminders and keeping them on track.
AI Assistant to AI Chief of Staff
Centralizing the data of a team from the basis of its calendars creates a series of potential benefits.
One, the AI knows what everyone is doing at any given moment. This is very useful, and simple immediate benefits include the ability for an AI to instantly book group meetings without difficulty, overcoming the struggles that existing software and booking links currently have with multi-person meetings. A unified AI removes all difficulty from that task.
Two, the AI can attend all meetings, producing notes and actionable summaries. By having this centralized AI working from everyone's calendars, it knows who is in what meeting and what they have contributed. Everyone can access shared notes and provide commentary, edits, or contributions.
This begins the process of turning the AI into a knowledge base for the company, provided access permissions are in place. Someone can ask the AI a question, and it can provide answers from the knowledge it has been documenting, working within people's meetings, tasks, and reading existing wikis.
This centralized knowledge overcomes the problems that knowledge bases and wikis have long tried and struggled to solve.
Three, as the AI is present in meetings, and understands the content and the context of the organization, along with each individual's availability on their calendars, it will be able to pull tasks and to-dos from meetings. It can suggest who they should be assigned or delegated to.
At the end of the meeting, the AI can schedule space on those individuals' calendars for when they should complete those tasks, providing the basic task management needed.
In the context of task management, the AI is no longer simply an assistant but perhaps a project manager. But with the addition of knowledge base technology and shared smart calendar capability, the AI system isn't just an AI project manager, but now, a complete AI Chief of Staff.
The Future Arrives Faster Than You Expect
This vision of the future presents a new way of working and a new way of thinking about the workplace. But this sci-fi future is closer than it appears. Xembly does not provide an omniscient AI that can give a complete overview of every action in the company, but it's halfway there.
Xembly allows you to manage your calendar and your team's calendars while automating meeting notes, pulling action items, and then managing those tasks all through a conversational AI interface.
The future of work now looks more like people being free to focus on their core activities while AI steps in to knit it all together. Xembly reports users saving 17% of their time each week by using AI executive assistants. Maybe the future is already here?