The lean startup is an idea oft-repeated in the technology industry, popularized in 2011 by Eric Reis’ eponymously named book and proven effective for bringing new products to market. The concepts behind the lean startup are designed to build a sustainable organization around a set of products or services, and include minimum viable products, customer development and pivots as a means to do so. While this model has been successfully employed by startups and established companies alike, artificial intelligence company x.ai is testing a new approach.
X.ai was founded by Dennis Mortensen in 2013 with a mission to create a personal assistant powered by artificial intelligence. The virtual assistants — dubbed Amy and Andrew Ingram — work to help professionals drastically cut down on time spent scheduling meetings. But instead of rolling out Amy and Andrew to the masses, Mortensen has kept the company in closed beta over the past three years, growing his team to 73 people focused on intensive research and development. In the era of the lean startup, such a long product development cycle is rare.
Today, x.ai released its first paid product, the Professional edition of its AI personal assistant, and Amy and Andrew are finally coming out of beta.
“Typically, you see startups go to market with a basic product, but we’ve spent the past three years in the basement working on our core utility to make this work,” said x.ai CEO and founder Dennis R. Mortensen. “And we somehow got 73 people to sit with us in that basement for three years of core research and development.”
Over the past several years, Amy and Andrew have scheduled hundreds of thousands of meetings and processed millions of scheduling-related emails. In the process, the company has been training the virtual assistants by amassing and annotating a huge data set and building her core infrastructure.
Targeted to individuals, x.ai’s Professional edition will allow customers to schedule unlimited meetings every month. This first edition will also feature VIP contacts who can schedule meetings with you directly through Amy and personalized signatures. The monthly subscription fee is $39.
X.ai also plans to release a business edition of the service for enterprises who want to incorporate the technology into their companies at large.
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