Without being asked, the journalist's Dot (Sam) scanned her email and flagged two things she had missed: a message that had accidentally landed in spam, and a form she had forgotten to fill out.
Ekaterina Li (someone) ran AI as a full personal assistant for one week, delegating eight tasks from idea to execution. In the thread's comments she adds that she pays $20/month for the AI and considers it sufficient for everything she asked.
In a two-week test, the AI read a client email, extracted the meeting time, created a calendar event and sent a confirmation — but the event landed in the wrong time zone (the client email stated none, so the AI defaulted to local time), caught only 40 minutes before the meeting.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Before a speaking engagement, Ulanoff couldn't recall where he was talking or where to park. He asked the AI to find the original note from his contact, misspelling the contact's name.
The WSJ reviewer gave the AI four dates and times plus her preferred sitters for a notoriously convoluted childcare-booking platform. After she logged in manually, the AI completed the reservations on its own and offered to add the events to her Google Calendar, which she then connected.
The AI’s tools produced printable booth artifacts for a nonprofit he advises; in about 30 minutes he had a professional PDF uploaded to FedEx Kinkos for printing.
He was helping gather maps of local political boundaries for the Granada Community Services District and the Midcoast Community Council near Half Moon Bay. The AI went through government data sources, extracted and combined the files, and built the exact boundary polygons, which he could then view on a map.
Every month the family benefits system asks him for a fresh proof of domicile, and a forgotten upload stops the payments. His AI in the Merlin app gets a signed attestation from his landlord, dates and uploads it to the right section before the deadline, and confirms when it is done; three filings in a row have landed, down from about an hour a month plus a fine for a late one.