Let These Robots Schedule Your Work Meetings

The only thing more tedious than going to a meeting is scheduling one, which helps explain whyscheduling-software startups outnumber Republicans running for president. By the count of Dennis Mortensen, founder of X.ai, at least 47 rivals are trying to do what his company does—eliminate the flurry of e-mails that precedes even the simplest get-together with a co-worker for coffee.

X.ai may be the most ambitious of the bunch. Rather than an app or e-mail widget, its product is an entirely automated personal assistant. Sign up with X.ai, and your meetings will be corralled over e-mail by a helper named Amy Ingram or, if you would prefer a male assistant, Andrew Ingram. If you are nerdy enough, you may have already picked up on the joke: The initials for both assistants are A.I., as in artificial intelligence, and an n-gram is a technique used in computational linguistics.