Oxfam put out a report that women still spend, on average, 4.5 hours of unpaid labor at home, while men spend 2.8 hours. So there’s still a delta, and it’s a challenge.
The construct of families continues to evolve, and people play different roles now. But what hasn’t changed is that every family has a chief household officer, and there is someone stressing about the coordination [and] the burden of everyday life. That is a lot. There’s app overload, activity overload, people coordination overload because it takes a village to raise a family. So, there’s still a major gap, whatever the construct, and that’s really who we’re serving at the end of the day: someone who is juggling everyday life coordination with their household, or for a broader household and multiple people.
Families are asking for [help]. They’ve got to coordinate, and here’s something very useful that creates peace of mind for families that have to just administratively coordinate things without getting emotional between two households that may be co-parenting [but perhaps] not in the smoothest relationship. O (the name of the virtual assistant) can facilitate what needs to happen in between.
Mantras of an entrepreneur
One of my mantras is “authentic boldness.” As an entrepreneur, you’ll never answer the question of fulfilling your vision or dream unless you take the plunge. And certainly, you have to have that DNA. But the second thing is, I tend to ground myself in data. So yes, I’m taking the plunge, but with a thesis in mind.
We always have a thesis. It was very similar to Care.com—when we first launched, we never envisioned that we were going to launch housekeeping within the first year of Care. But because the users were really asking for it, we launched it pretty early. We had again, our thesis, and our thesis also for Care.com was that senior care was going to be in demand right away. We were proven wrong— it took 10 years for that to really take off.
What we’ve learned now is really to listen to users and focus. What’s beautiful about building a service and a product of a personal assistant using generative AI is you can get to the data of what families need and what they’re looking for.
Using tech for good
Behind every tech are human beings. 90% of the tasks completed right now on Ohai are [done by] AI, but we have human assistants behind the scenes to ensure a great user experience. And then we have the AI sometimes shadow the human assistants as they’re training the AI to complete a task. But then again, that’s also just 10% of the time.
So, we are really AI-native tech first. But we always believe that the human assistants have a very important role to play: to ensure there’s a great user experience. It allows us to focus and listen in on the users as we continue to leverage the AI for efficiency, get things done, free up time and, again, reduce the cognitive load.