Industry insiders say the next big thing in AI is “proactive” systems: agents that can anticipate a user’s needs — and fulfill them — before the user even knows what those needs are.
One startup that’s looking to make headway in this area is IrisGo. The company, which closed a $2.8 million seed round led by Andrew Ng’s AI Fund earlier this year, is building a desktop companion for PCs that can learn about a user’s daily workflows and then automate them with limited to no human prompting.
Iris was co-founded by Jeffrey Lai, a former Apple engineer who helped to build the Chinese language version of Siri, the company’s automated assistant. (Somewhat slyly, Iris is Siri spelled backwards.)
The core idea is simple: show Iris how to do something once, and it remembers that process for future automated use — no repeat instructions needed.
During a conversation with TechCrunch, Lai ran a demo, showing how Iris could learn to place a coffee order online. As I watched, Iris recorded the steps it took to select a latte from Philz Coffee (a popular Bay Area chain), fill out credit card information, and then hit purchase. Lai then asked Iris to repeat the order on its own; the agent dutifully complied.
