Show Notes
Last week on the Platformer podcast, Replit's Amjad Masad predicted that within three years, we'll be using fewer apps and more agents — with the agents using apps on our behalf. For the fifth episode of our miniseries on productivity in the AI era, I talked to someone building one of those agents.
Jean-Denis Greze is the co-founder and CEO of Town — though his actual title there is mayor. Town's signature bet is that you will not have a relationship with a piece of software so much as with a character. Your assistant — Town calls it a townie — gets a name, a personality, and an animal avatar; Greze's is a silver fox named Ivy, a nod to his prematurely gray hair. (Mine is a cheerful finch named Rufus.)
Within about 90 seconds of connecting my email and calendar, it had produced a scary-good dossier about who I am, who I know, and what I'm working on; over the first two weeks, it builds a private wiki about your life that Greze told me costs the company about $100 per user to generate.
Plus, Platformer fellow Ella Markianos joins at the top of the show to discuss this week's news about AI and jobs.
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Three months ago, we began our podcast miniseries by asking how likely artificial intelligence is to take large numbers of jobs. Our first guest, Box CEO Aaron Levie, argued that mass disruption would be highly unlikely. And several subsequent guests, from Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman to labor economist Kathryn Ann Edwards, expressed similar skepticism about a labor wipeout.