Comment by saalweachter
1 day ago
So here's where this all feels a bit "build me a better horse" to me.
You're telling an AI agent to communicate specific information on your behalf to specific people. "Tell my boss I can't come in today", "Talk to comcast about the double billing".
That's not abstracted away enough.
"My daughter's sick, rearrange my schedule." Let the agent handle rebooking appointments and figuring out who to notify and how. Let their agent figure out how to convey that information to them. "Comcast double-billed me." Resolve the situation. Communicate with Comcast, get it fixed, if they don't get it fixed, communicate with the bank or the lawyer.
If we're going to have AI agents, they should be AI agents, not AI chatbots playing a game of telephone over email with other people and AI chatbots.
Exactly. To be a useful assistant, it has to be more proactive than they're currently able to be.
Someone posted here about an AI assistant he wrote that sounded really cool. But when I looked at it, he had written a bunch of scripts that fetched things like his daily calendar appointments and the weather forecast, fed them to an AI to be worded in a particular way, and then emailed the results to him. So his scripts were doing all the work except wording the messages differently. That's a neat toy, but it's not really an assistant.
An assistant could be told, "Here's a calendar. Track my appointments, enter new ones I tell you about, and remind me of upcoming ones." I can script all that, but then I don't need the AI. I'm trying to figure out how to leverage AI to do something actually new in that area, and not having much luck yet.