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Artificial intelligence company X.ai is expanding beyond serving individual professionals to now include entire teams. Today it launched its business edition, which lets employees use their own virtual assistant to schedule meetings across G Suite, Outlook, and Office 365 calendars. Companies can pay $59 per user per month for this capability, something X.ai thinks could reduce one of the big unnecessary headaches in the workplace: coordinating schedules.
When it launched in October, X.ai’s initial objective was to help people schedule meetings by making sense of our calendars. It has two “assistants,” Amy and Andrew, which you interact with through email — you just include a special email address in your correspondences and ask either Amy or Andrew to find a time to set up a meeting. X.ai declined to share how many users it has, but it disclosed that “hundreds of thousands of meetings” have been scheduled.
With the business edition, businesses can white-label the X.ai assistant right on their own domain. So instead of emailing amy@x.ai, the address will now be amy@yourdomain.com, which gives a more professional look when interacting with clients or someone important. Amy and Andrew’s signature can also be customized and branded to the company so it appears that they are actual employees, rather than bots.
“We’ve been overwhelmed by the interest in getting Amy on board for entire teams,” said X.ai cofounder and chief executive Dennis Mortensen in a statement. “No one wants to schedule their own meetings, and yet we ask our employees to do this all the time. Having an AI scheduling assistant frees your team up to do the work they’re actually paid to do.”
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Since Amy and Andrew know the calendars of everyone in the organization, X.ai promises that it’ll be easy to schedule internal meetings: “you don’t have to look at shared calendars anymore,” a company spokesperson told VentureBeat.
This business edition may raise privacy concerns since the virtual assistant can “see” everything on someone’s calendar. However, X.ai sought to assuage fears, saying that its administrators do not have access to individual calendars — they can only set up accounts and add or delete users. The company said it never gives out information beyond finding available times for requested meetings.
While the business edition costs $59 per user per month, X.ai said that companies will only be billed for those team members who schedule at least one meeting a month.
The personal premium subscription plan of $39 per month remains available.
