The Time Lords Manifesto

The ultimate promise of technology was that we’d be able to reclaim our time. Economist John Maynard Keynes even suggested that we’d only need to work about 15 hours per week and as a result, we’d be able to spend more time on things like creativity, innovation, and problem-solving, even leisure. I don’t know what…
Future of Work, Productivity, Time Lords
Dennis Mortensen Dennis Mortensen

Reflecting on our tech stack in 2017

It has been three and half years since we founded x.ai. We have built an AI scheduling assistant. Our assistant (which goes by the names Amy and Andrew Ingram) is a fully autonomous agent. To build Amy and Andrew, we’ve needed to collect and process an enormous amount of scheduling related emails (5 million and…
Computing, Data, Startup
Alex Poon Alex Poon

Why soft skills are so important to the future of work

Employers often use the term “soft skills” as a catch-all for everything that’s not considered a core, cognitive ability related to a job (like writing code for a programmer or running data analysis for a marketer). Those soft skills might include everything from creativity to collaboration to punctuality, and they’re increasingly important as our work…
Future of Work
Josh Catone Josh Catone

How AI is changing my job: Wade Foster, CEO at Zapier

This post is part of x.ai’s ‘Future of Jobs’ interviews series. We’re talking to leaders and mavericks to find out how emerging technologies like AI and automation are changing how they do their jobs. You can find all the posts in the series here.   Wade Foster knows a thing or two about automation. He’s the…
Future of Jobs, Future of Work
Josh Catone Josh Catone

Master creativity — the future depends on it

According to the World Economic Forum, creativity will be the third most in-demand job skill in 2020, behind critical thinking and complex problem solving. That’s because as AI, machine learning, and automation mature, we’ll begin to put a premium on human skills like creative thinking. “When the data is all being spit out for you,…
Future of Work, Productivity, Startup
Josh Catone Josh Catone

What’s new at x.ai in October 2017

Here’s what we do at x.ai: we solve meeting scheduling. That’s the only thing. We come to the office every day and hunker down to work on making meeting scheduling through AI the best experience possible. While we’re pretty good at it already, we still have much work to do to smooth Amy and Andrew’s…
Artificial Intelligence, Meeting Scheduling
Dennis Mortensen Dennis Mortensen

The Stoic’s guide to time

One of the hallmarks of our work future is time. As we offload more mundane and repeatable tasks to machines, we’ll be rewarded with more time to focus on the things that we do best as humans. But how should we spend that time? What should we do to make sure we don’t squander the…
Future of Work, Productivity
Josh Catone Josh Catone

Why we need to build more humanity into STEM education

STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education is often trumpeted as a panacea for economic growth. It’s the key to our future where all the good jobs and wage growth will happen. But that only tells part of the story. Sure, science and tech are fast growing sectors and there’s a continued need for highly…
Future of Work
Josh Catone Josh Catone