
Today, we’re finding that we are increasingly reliant on artificial intelligence. The “navigator” in the car is an AI. The customer service representative is an AI. The search engine is an AI. In some cases, co-workers are AIs. So why not the executive assistant?
Recurring administrative tasks take up an unprecedented amount of our time today. It has been estimated that managers spend more than 25 hours a week on these type of repetitive but necessary jobs. While human executive assistants are effective, they are expensive and only available to about two percent of the workforce. Experts note that the recent influx of productivity tools has only exacerbated the problem, forcing employees to navigate numerous apps to get their tasks done. With the recent explosion of ChatGPT plug-ins, it’s expected that this fragmentation will increase.
This week, several veterans of Google, Meta and AWS announced the formation of NinjaTech AI, a generative AI company building what the company is calling “the first true next-generation personal assistant since Siri.” Powered by proprietary large language models, decision engines and generative AI, NinjaTech was created to bring to life AI agents as a TaskGPT for working professionals to get day-to-day administrative tasks done efficiently and cost effectively.
The company also announced it closed a $5 million seed round from investors, including SRI International – the venture arm of the independent non-profit research institute that developed the tech behind Siri – Candou Ventures, DCVC, Laszlo Bock and more. The NinjaTech team is co-founded by Babak Pahlavan who previously built personal assistant company Clever Sense, which was acquired by Google in 2011, and Sam Naghshineh, who was a prominent AI leader at Meta for five years who also had previously established and sold Decasense, an AI-powered video intelligence company.
“Our next-generation conversational AI platform leverages our own custom large language models, along with a series of proprietary decision engines, enabling the creation of the world’s first scalable and affordable AI-powered executive assistant," said Pahlavan. “With SRI’s help, we believe that for the first time it’s now possible to start interacting with computers conversationally, just like how we interact with people, and ask for their assistance to get things done.”
Edited by
Greg Tavarez