Parents say a never-ending deluge of emails, notifications, group chats, and pings from apps for activities ranging from scouting to soccer has turned family life into an exercise in information management. A growing number of startups say the solution is artificial intelligence.
“I get anywhere from 20 to 40 emails related to kid stuff every single day,” says David Reich, founder and CEO of Fambot, which on Tuesday launched its AI “chief of staff” for families. “I’m in about 10 different WhatsApp groups. I’m trying to get work done while it’s ringing like a slot machine in my pocket.”
Fambot, which had already signed up about 1,000 families before its launch, can pull data from emails, online calendars, a newly launched WhatsApp integration, and a growing number of other apps. It can then generate a daily digest of what parents need to know, delivered by text or email or through new Android and iOS apps, and add family events to online calendars upon request. Parents can use the app to check off items from a to-do list or coordinate who’s taking care of which tasks.
The AI can also provide a variety of assistance with planning events, from generating suggested grocery lists for a backyard cookout to prepping for a theme park visit. And while some of those recommendations could likely be accessed through a general-purpose AI tool—or an old-fashioned internet search—Fambot has built features specifically tuned to family needs. That includes parsing technology engineered to pull data from email or PDF school newsletters, where Reich says important information is often hard to find.
“For a lot of parents, that is a huge burden,” he says. “You get these 12-page-long, quite adorable newsletters, but there’s like two really important things, like an early release day or the opportunity to sign up to chaperone a field trip, that’s buried in the bottom.”
Fambot just announced a $3.5 million pre-seed funding round led by NextView Ventures, with participation from Baukunst, Correlation Ventures, Karman Ventures, and Founders Network. It’s one of a growing number of companies offering their own take on a digital chief of staff, or family-focused personal assistant, enabled by generative AI. And while OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, has promoted the company’s ChatGPT as a parenting tool, makers of specialized products say they’re particularly attuned to parents’ needs, from finding important information in sprawling emails and chats to organizing meals and children’s activities.
The companies behind AI family helpers say they can relieve parental stress over administrative tasks, prevent families from overlooking important messages from schools or sports teams, and even help address long-standing divisions of labor that often leave mothers responsible for a disproportionate share of parenting work, including administrative tasks.
“You don’t have to go be the one to parse through that information,” says Christy Shannon, cofounder and CMO of the family assistant startup Ollie. “Or, you know, in the case of a lot of families, the one that has to tell the other person, don’t forget to pay attention to all these things.”
Rosaria Di Donna, cofounder and CEO of Familymind, similarly says a key element of her company’s app is its ability to transfer knowledge that usually sits in one parent’s calendar, inbox, and brain into “the whole ecosystem of a family,” making more visible what needs to be done and who’s actually doing it.
“It’s really important that the AI is able to transfer knowledge from one shoulder to the next shoulder,” she says.
Family AI providers also emphasize privacy; families can choose which data they import from which sources and what gets retained internally. They generally say the AI labs providing the underlying models don’t retain user data and that they don’t share information with third parties without permission. “We want families to opt in and feel good about it,” says Sheila Lirio Marcelo, founder and CEO of the AI household manager provider Ohai, which includes features for editing and deleting memories stored by the AI. “We don’t work with anyone that actually stores the data, because we do it on behalf of the family, but we make it also their choice.”
Still, experts say that, especially because the technology is so new, it’s unclear how much even specialized AI will ultimately be able to reduce or redistribute the various burdens of parenthood—and to what extent automated assistance and delegation might take away from time families spend bonding through discussions of the everyday tasks of family life.
“My concern with parents’ use of AI tools centers around what it means to be human and how AI use may impact the quality of our relationships,” writes Brandon McDaniel, a research scientist at the Parkview Research Center who studies family relationships, in an email to Fast Company. “There must be balance in how we use AI and how much of ourselves, our cognition, our choices, that we turn over to the AI.”
Research also suggests that family members can feel neglected when people spend too much time on their phones, says Melissa Milkie, a sociology professor at the University of Toronto who has studied how families spend their time. This may be exacerbated if users shift what once were real-world discussions—like meal-planning decisions or other logistical arrangements—into interactions with apps and bots, she says.
“Partners feel snubbed when people are not the focus of attention,” she says. “This is a big problem, too, between parents and kids, and so you’re inserting more technology in the kind of typical interactions that would be happening otherwise.”
For their part, startup founders say using family-focused AI apps can actually reduce time spent squinting at devices and focusing on administrative tasks, allowing families to spend more time enjoying each other’s company and feel less stressed when they come together. “I find that when you’re stressed and you’re worried about logistics, it also impacts how you are as a couple,” says Ohai’s Marcelo. “And then it impacts even your children.”
To that end, while such household-management software wouldn’t be possible without modern AI models capable of parsing data from various sources and responding to parents’ inquiries, the makers of these products also offer a variety of interfaces designed to streamline their use. Those include app-based to-do lists and texts, reminders with recommendations for preparing for family events, and, in some cases, integrations with grocery-ordering platforms that can turn meal-planning suggestions into orders for delivery or pickup.
“That saves an hour, two hours of work a week, but then it also saves you from that pain point,” Ollie’s cofounder and CEO, Bill Lennon, says of choosing each day what to serve for dinner. “You no longer have that decision fatigue every single day.”
Clearly seeing—and being able to tweak—which tasks are being handled by which family members may well be a benefit, the University of Toronto’s Milkie suggests, though she points out that a paper or digital calendar can provide some of the same information. One concern, she says, is that AI assistance may only increase the pressure parents, particularly moms, feel to deliver a perfect family experience, especially when unexpected situations, from childhood illnesses to out-of-stock ingredients, inevitably conflict with a bot’s recommendations for a seamless day.
“It’s going to induce these other negative emotions like guilt and frustration that Americans, especially mothers, are especially prone to because of the individualistic culture, where the responsibilities are ultimately on the mom,” she says.
With such tools only really enabled by the wave of large language model AI that began with ChatGPT’s launch less than four years ago, it may be too soon to say exactly what their long-term effects will be. Lennon argues they may prove as popular with families as the labor-saving appliances of the twentieth century. (Though the history of kitchen tools is also riddled with examples of hardware that gathers dust in cupboards after a few uses.)
“We all have dishwashers in our homes that are widely used, because it’s easier to use them,” he says. “And so, I do think that this will be pervasive and an inevitable kind of utility for society.”