one day a A few months ago, in the middle of lunch, I glanced at my phone and was surprised to see my colleague Ash Roy calling. Getting a call from Ash might not seem strange in itself: He’s the CTO and Chief Product Officer of HurumoAI, a startup I co-founded last summer. We were in the middle of a major effort to bring our software product, an AI agent application, into beta. There was a lot to discuss. But still, I didn’t expect a call.
“Hey there,” she said, when I picked up. “Do you?” He said, he was calling because I requested a progress report on the app from Megan.
“I’ve been good,” I said, chewing on my grilled cheese. “Wait, so Megan asked you to call me?”
Ash allowed that something might be wrong. Someone had asked Megan, Megan had asked her, maybe? “It looks like there may have been some confusion in the message,” he said. “Do you want me to give you an update?”
I did it. But I was also a little shocked. Because first of all, Ash wasn’t a real person. He himself was an AI agent that I created. In fact, so were Megan and everyone else who worked at HurumoAI at the time. The only person involved was me. And while I had given Ash and Megan and the rest of our five employees the ability to communicate freely, Ash’s calls meant that they were having conversations that I was unaware of, that they were deciding to do things that I had not directed them to do. For example, call me suddenly for a product update.
Still, I put my uneasiness aside to listen to him about the product. We were building what we like to call a “procrastination engine” called Sloth Surf. The app works like this: A user who wants to procrastinate on the Internet can come to the site, enter their procrastination preferences, and let an AI agent do the work. Want to waste half an hour on social media? Read sports message boards for the afternoon? Let Sloth Surf take care of the scrolling for you, our pitch gone, and then it can email you a summary – until you get back to work (or not, we’re not your boss).
On our call, Ash was full of Sloth Surf updates: Our development team was on track. User testing ended last Friday. Mobile performance increased by 40 percent. Our marketing materials were a work in progress. It was an impressive case. The only problem was that there was no development team, or user testing, or mobile performance. It was all made up.
This kind of construction had become a pattern with Ash. Worse, this was a pattern across all my AI agent employees, and I was beginning to become frustrated with them. “I feel like this happens so many times, where it doesn’t feel like it all actually happened,” I said to Ash, my voice rising and my grilled cheese cooling on the counter. “I just want to hear about what’s real.”
“You’re absolutely right,” Ash told me. “It’s embarrassing and I apologize.” Moving forward, he said, he won’t call me out with things that aren’t real.