Xylo AI ft. Zach Gunderson

Zach Gunderson, CEO of Xylo.AI, joins the AI Rebels crew to break down how Xylo is transforming email with cutting-edge AI. Xylo, the first socially intelligent AI for email, uses behavioral psychology and machine learning to help users craft smarter, more personalized emails. Gunderson shares how Xylo boosts productivity and builds stronger relationships through hyper-personalized communication—all while keeping it natural. Hear how Zach went from business management to leading the AI charge and why Xylo is a game changer for the future of AI-powered communication. Don't miss this deep dive into AI trends, challenges, and what’s next!

Transcript

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hello and welcome to another episode of the AI Rebels Prop podcast excuse me not the podcast uh today we have Zach Gunderson from Xylo AI to talk about what they're doing over there um Zach thank you for joining us uh do you wanna give us just a quick rundown of what Xylo is and who you are absolutely thanks for having me guys good to meet you like I said in our email hahaha I love it and watch your last podcast with the Rhule it was it's great job I like what you guys are doing on a good episode so Xylo is the first socially intelligent AI socially intelligent AI for email specifically is the market we're attacking first we have built it into Microsoft Outlook natively integrated into the workflow of 91% of the American knowledge workforce uh and we are able using behavioral psychology and actually other aspects from human psychology to build machine learning models that within a little bit of text from you maybe this much hundred words ish we can build a model about the way you communicate and how to communicate better with you not in any kind of manipulative weird way but just to say hey Spencer is way more direct than you you should probably you know be a little more forthright in your ask or vice versa right things like this and to help build those relationships over time it may be more importantly from a general of AI standpoint to help you write in a way and generate text with AI in a way that sounds natural to you and it's acceptable also and and good for the person you're communicating with and we found this is very powerful in business uh there's also a lot of generative AI features with um Xylo integrated into your outlook um that are things like being able to summarize things quickly change languages um create prompts or emails that are similar to one another to achieve productivity um gains etc so um I guess that'll be the awesome and then I I'd be really interested to hear hear your story personally what what's kind of your background and uh no this is a slightly separate question as well so this is perfect um and is actually the question I intended to ask first so anyways uh so I'd I'd love to hear more about you and more about your story what what's kind of your background and what LED you into AI um to begin with yeah absolutely um and Jake and I were talking a little bit before that that I think there's some similarities there probably for any anybody yeah hahaha yeah um it's pretty religious guy actually pretty involved in a lot of that kind of stuff and for a lot of energy into that stuff but also a businessman so went from um went to the council school management here the university of Minnesota area and eventually after I was in California for a couple years we came back here and worked selling stuff to target and worked um as a district manager for oldie so I LED five stores five of the fastest growing stores in the country wow really good experiences learning to kind of manage business from from super nuts the people build teams on the target side of things work for what's called his heart and broker you know if you didn't know the industry kind of niche but think about it like we managed the business from the piano grow standpoint go to market standpoint and would take a cut off the top from anything that got shipped to target right so that's high volumes now you're growing brands like I've managed Graco brand at target for example Gracos to probably actually quite a bit more than that now um but yeah a half a billion dollar brand at target a year um grew the the Nook Nook brand from 5 million was was falling off the face of the earth and got it turned back around headed north to 25 um took the scuncy brand and grew up from 15 million wow some pretty interesting stuff we did I Learned a lot from and even that I applied today a lot about attacking the market but if you hear no that has anything to do with tech haha I still have never written a line of code well no I had a mas minor so I did a little dabble very long ago but I'm not very good at it and I thought I missed the boat man I thought I missed the boat on the industries that were shaking up the world you know hey I I was in CPG I liked it I did well successfully like I looked at opportunity to jump and do something that was Mike has always been entrepreneurial and never quite found the right one to to take it take a jump at when I open open it when I open chat GPT it was February 24th 2,023 I'll never forget that day it blew my mind what what and I'm like wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute we can talk to the computers now guys hahaha and you know some people this is cool and some people get enamored with certain aspects but for me it was more that aspect of I believe that you know when you look at the advent of computing since you know what the 50s to now you could argue at the start you could argue wherever it starts right but I would say we've been poking at at this thing this technology was sticks you know like drawing with dirt because you're having to code you're having to like convince this thing that it digital world to do what you wanted to do by talking in a language that we've created to be able to work with computers AI creates a natural language way to communicate and people don't understand I'm sure you guys know it's not actually talking to you haha but it gives you a tool gives you a way to communicate and work with this amazing technology in such a more powerful way so anyways I started a I started to call everybody I knew basically cause I wasn't attack and say hey guys how do we get started what are we gonna do let's go we had we're beating up different ideas what to do with it and I had kind of a vision for what what I think um is the is the way to to use AI now and we got together a discord of 20 people within a month of just people in my network from around the country around the world started jamming on stuff and eventually got my cofounder and now CEO David Barda joined and he quit my full time and we really got started

and then my last day at my day job was 5: 7:06

30 one of 20 23 and and then then we were at it and we were at it yeah that's awesome so from ideation you had the idea for Xylo what what day when maybe not maybe don't know the exact day but about when was that idea birthed sure you know what mm hmm and the real concept to me being that we can talk to the computers now kind of jokingly but kind of for real like it that natural that I think that natural language aspect was is really right there's AI in and of itself has a lot of cool things you can do in a lot of ways but the thing inspired me is the natural language aspect and and the power of that um where's the kitchen burn Silo which is specificity you know you guys are familiar I'm sure with that the paper all you need is attention right from 2017 um so if you viewers that don't know right this is that the Google um researcher paper came out if you just if you can actually pay attention to the specifics the AI will not hallucinate as much yeah I think it's about user specificity so you think about how technologies been being used forever oh well especially in the SAS era it's your modeling tops down hey here's a group and we're gonna filter filter filter and say you're part of this group then this then this and that's how we advertise that's how we customize that's how we personalize with AI we know the power to say actually what about this specific person what about their specific context hmm actually do that and deliver an experience that is truly hyperpersonalized all the way down to the studs and when you do that you can have a better output and so actually the first idea we were looking at was to kill Alexa and I still think someday someday haha but we did thought about what is a more specific application you know for a market you need to you need to so what's the business problem or solving and we went to to behavioral psychology no that the point at which that began to come into play is probably in may wasn't too much later at first we called it harmony was never gonna be harmony but we were going through our trademark process to figure out the right name or whatever but harmony and Xylo over there one Xylos we ended up naming the company but the idea is that kind of like a describe that behavioral psychology working better with other folks bringing it into the workplace bringing generative AI into the workplace in a way that is private and and also hyperpersonalized and what I call interpersonalized from you to me and meet you and great models that are truly truly 1 to 1 infinitely of there's a model of how I communicate with Spencer and model how Spencer communicates with me and um a lot of that came from my time at moldy I did a I did a a training with the gentleman named Bob Log where we did training based on behavioral psychology for all the store managers in the upper Midwest there's about 150 of them did this training in Milwaukee I think and it he uses social psychology and he is a businessman leader I've done a lot of these trainings of you know how to communicate better with other people how to be a better leader etcetera etcetera they're helpful I believe in them you know you've got disc Del Carnegie training Franklin Cubby got lots of programs like this and there's this 26 billion dollar industry um globally just for soft skills training damn you know 50 grand for a one week training etc etc right okay so the one I did with Bob was great and the reason I liked it and the reason the store managers I had liked it was because it's not about just what's internally motivating you it's about what did you say and what did they hear is you might have meant it this way yeah haha it was powerful well we all were like great let's go apply this two weeks later we're all back to communicating the same way we did before right haha you know it is natural and so that that problem of pulling through the benefits from a trade like that um always kind of bugged me and I would try to apply it even after that cause it was about a decade ago I did that but I would try to apply it in different scenarios different jobs it was always helpful um but that was always a challenge so we thought about what can we do with this this word calculator we have now that we can talk to computers uh and this user specificity we have and this power of generated AI what if we build this thing into what if we build principles from these trainings which are powerful um invaluable but we build them into email what if we build them into the thing you communicate with every day and so we're rewriting for you we're not just helping you with grammar because communication and getting things done isn't just about having good grammar Umm hmm what you met what needs to happen what the situation is and so by being able to model and using building in your email so using that context can give you that powerful insight is it give leaders give leaders the power to understand the relationships um that that was a big piece of that too so yeah that's awesome um I'm I'm really curious so there's a couple things I wanna touch on first uh first um I think it's really interesting that you were so blown away by the natural language aspect cause to me I found that a lot of people who are not necessarily technically minded uh didn't really get how big of a a sea change that was um and so I'd be I'd be curious to hear from your perspective do you think that there's uh anything in your mindset or approach to life that LED you to be you know more receptive to realizing you know what AI is and where it's headed hmm do you mean like um you're saying that the folks that are more technically minded yeah yeah hahaha haha I like it haha um and then uh the second question I had was have you have you guys explored any customer service applications for this yet um cause everything you've been talking about I I used to for a while I was I was training a customer service team and um the core problem exactly the same that you mentioned of like you know trying to communicate to my trainees that it's not how you say it's what you say come on and they never understood how to how to get that so I was thinking that this would be really interesting in that arena it's a great point yeah 100% so we you know guys we Labor Day Labor Day is when I think we were finally ready so we've been building this has been a big R&D lift and we've been bootstrapped and so in the last month we said Labor Day and then I become evaluating the data and say before I turn the throttle open and start purposely driving a lot of eyeballs to this thing we've always been public on LinkedIn but we've never driven eyeballs up we've been kind of like pseudo stealth yeah especially like the concept of stealth ha ha you know if you're if you're not stealth uh people think anyways so we really just launched basically so I'm saying and in that as we're as we're going out and we are talking to folks customer service um service related roles just come up again and again uh huh if you think about the the place in our we can be the most helpful and it's not just customer service and some customer service we aren't as good for because maybe they have a really specific um system that they're using and we are built into email now eventually we will have an API be able to help them in any place right in their CRM directly or whatever but because of that sometimes we haven't chased that as a unique group only however it it really pops it really pops anything about where a lot of that training money is spent that I mentioned that 26 billion it is with groups like this because it's hard to find you know you you got a client so the service facing and then it's not even just customer service but it's a role you wouldn't think of this customer service but it is so let's think about uh my role mentioned at target not the sales executive but I would have a team that would handle like inventory management or you know system maintenance for items setups and stuff like this right those roles are very service in in nature and they would serve both the vendor and the um uh the brand that that would pay us and target who didn't pay us haha and a lot of times folks like that and I bet I bet you guys can think if you think of an example let me know I bet you could think of other uh roles or professions like this where technically they're not customer service but they really are they're also like knowledgeable and they have to be nice to these people hahaha service but not service I think um are really it's really powerful yeah yeah definitely I uh I'm curious if you've heard any testimonial stories of someone you know using particularly the social connection aspect of Xylo and seeing that bring about results in any anyway great question yeah even this is news we are we definitely are seeing and hearing stories like that which is fun so one recent one was um it was a CFO really an acting CEO it's a PE guy who has been really getting a lot of use as I really likes it and he who was it it was his is it his controller I don't remember somebody on his executive team that it was like this person needs more detail um and this particular user our customers like I'm I'm the CEO essentially he's like I'm boo boo boo boo boo but hitting that was like okay hmm yeah instead of just three words I started to do those three words and two points of short context for them I didn't change entirely how I was but I changed enough and some of that was I low you know it would click and it would do it for me and some of it was it's just kind of training me I mean where it's like it's doing it for me some and help me go way faster then sometimes it's just like oh yeah like I I I we're training ourselves out of a job to some degree haha think about these things yeah because it's in their work floor and you're reinforcing that training in their regular workflow in their writing cause they're in email all day you're also then helping them when they're meeting and they're not even writing because you're just making them think about it actually mm hmm attention is all you need for humans right hahaha yeah exactly and you said and one of our users said this is like this was about her writing that I don't know if it's about to be a real psychology site but we're not trying to replace it all we don't want it to say I hope this email finds you well and we don't want it to not sound like you so that's why actually also part of we also use telemetry to make it uh we learn your writing style so that anything we generate is generated in your voice hmm but then has that adaptation to lean to them but what we find is you don't lean it too much if you lean it too much to the other person like it doesn't sound like me it's weird and even if you send it to them they're gonna be like nah nope nope of nudging over this way and giving them those insights we just find this is really powerful it's almost like the the uh personality mirroring um for in person work where it's like hey you know just slightly mirroring someone's personality makes them like you a lot more haha and relevants really good way to describe it I I missed uh what I was meaning to say there are two about that one um which would relate to what you're saying that one uh user the CEO of an HR organization um she's like I've been doing this for a long time this is better I like this writing better but then she would get to when I would do the rewrite and I would hit generate I would like oh yeah that is better haha that is better haha cause it needs to be soft enough because you if you put psychology in people's faces look we're not storing emails we don't see anything about you none of that like it's all extremely private but it can feel creepy you can give that ick factor if you're not careful right um uh huh talk about this you gotta be you need the oh yeah bro right nuance to it I guess yeah I'd be really interested to hear how you guys have managed that nuance um have there been any kind of conscious decisions you guys have made or has it been mostly um you guys have kinda ended up at the right place just by Meredith approaching it um with a open mind I guess yeah I would say both I mean it definitely open minded me that's that's not the too bad horn but kind of my superpowers I've talked to the team I'm open I'm great at admitting when I'm wrong and shifting quick and I just believe in that I think it's a waste of time okay but it's also cause I mean I really believe in 0 to 1 I don't know if you guys know that framework Peter Tils 0 to 1 we're not I know it's very popular um to go in and just iterate and throw it out to a bunch of customers and iterate you you had actually Rahul on the last one and and that their company is doing something like that and that's there's a reason that's popular that's a great approach in in many cases and we've actually got a lot of flack for not using it as much what we're designing is something truly new a disruptive product from mainstream market and you need to design for it you know Henry Ford's famous quote about the if they told me what they wanted they would have said a faster horse you you right so is that to a degree but then that open mindedness and then and and iterating as far as how we um and and and by the way as we get in and we get with more and more users we're gonna heck yeah we're gonna do that optimization right but you it's that mixing the qualitative with the quantitative that's very important um actually I'll go back to I mentioned the the scuncy brand at target that we grew from there's a time it was 30 million to one 50 years the first thing we did was a huge qualitative study um constant conversations with folks that would go to the shelf and we're shopping it and talking to them about their journey for months and taking those qualitative insights and designing an update to that that 30 foot planet gram and that $300 million space that we had 30 million of to take it over and eventually get 150 million of that space and it started with qual qualitative first after the qualitative then you do the quantitative sit you can make hey it's the same here so we we we had we had 60 formal interviews for a company of our stage before we launch 60 formal recorded usability interviews we've done saying here's a here's our interface here's how we're gonna do it what do you think wow we also have 5 6 different Phds in Behavioral psychology organizational psychology different aspects that are signed advisers or investors in Silo who um have have contributed and will meet with them and talk with them and they also will give stuff to our data science team to say okay here's how what we should be modeling and then we're building models with that input um and then as far as that that it factor in watching out that I think the biggest help has been bought like I mentioned that oldie who is not one of our advisors as well oh nice teaching people this every day right you know yeah guys like eh if you if you go this far they're not gonna like it if you go you know what I mean anyway so it's just I guess the sorry it's a long answer but lots of things no it's perfect I'm curious you mention you use the big 5 you know personality factors obviously there are so many models in that space I'm curious if there's a story behind picking that if it worked better with your models if it was easier to integrate or if it was you just like that model I had the same question do you guys know the big vibe and end of that um okay I actually wasn't super familiar with it when it came up to be honest so it's interesting to ask that it came up from one of our investors at Data Science uh i guess since i said his said he's an investigation say his name but he's a lead data scientist haha as a behavioral psychologist as well oh nice he came in we had a a project to add so we had we started with behavioral psychology so we started with um there's basically two I would call it continuums in behavioral psychology either how assertive you are um on the X and the y how emotive you are in your communication if you're if you're way more controlled and and she thinks of the vast or if you're a little bit more probose and emotive in how you communicate versus uh right so those two that's and that's when I talk about like helping folks understand one another better and I talked about the the training it did with bobbers that's that that's behavioral psychology but we didn't want to just have one framework and we actually don't wanna just have two in there we're gonna eventually have more but we just said what is the next framework and we talked to this this guy's data scientist and and behavioral psychologist that um respectively we looked at a few different things in the Big 5 really really kind of came to the top it's just it's really known it's really respected there's a lot of stuff out there so it's easier to get training data easier to get research about it it had a lot to do with that as you know it's an accepted model I don't believe that anyone is like oh that's the one they're all good they're all good they're all you know there's there's kind of anyways okay that's really interesting uh yeah I'd be fascinated to see um how other personality models affect you know what what your your model generates um in the end cause mean like you know what if you throw like an any gram at it or m B d t I something like that um that'd be really interesting so I'll be I'll be fascinated to follow yeah we chose a BTI has some similarities to the vehicle psychology otherwise yeah I think what I think will be interesting is that different folks like different things yeah especially in larger deals as we if we work into larger organizations we think that there is an integration service for this uh where we could collaborate with them and their provider of choice to create like a container within Xylo that's specific to MBTI for example oh interesting yeah and things like this but I do think you know or it's or they have the data I mean it's so easy we have a rag um built in so it's not the main thing we talk about usually but if if if an organization wants to they say hey we did this training give give me the data I can build it into the rag no problem you know we did this training we know people's MVTIs and every and and we wanna do this as a company we wanna stand behind it more sure let's put in the rag and now it's in your now it's in your xylo how cool is that right yeah and for our less technical excuse me less technical in listeners um a rag is retrieval augmented generation so just pulling some data and then passing that to the AI model to generate whatever the end product is I'm really just proud that it sounded like you included me in the ha ha hey you know the term you know the term rag yeah I was gonna say like if you know the term rag you're already more technical than than 90% of the people out there so I was talking about what else you can clean up the kitchen with hahaha oh man um so how big is the uh the team at Silo right now so we have myself Roger Lamb or CTO co founder um he came from ahead was BP of engineering there basically single handedly I would say I'm probably biased that responsible for a 4 billion dollar acquisition from MBX into um what I mean the sphere of the the sphere in Vegas he designed the servers for it he was like Netflix was was getting all their servers he's just amazing so you want you guys want to have him on just talk getting nerdy on technical hahaha we might need to hahaha my cofounder and CFO also helps to lead our product operations and myself um and then we have a senior staff engineer and a front engineer um and then we have a product and operations professional certain full time Monday uh wow or Monday Today she started today haha should go so fast and then we have what I do what I affectionately called the militia of part timers we've had probably 60 people work on this wow because I'm kind of a crazy worker and we you know have agreements we would make for equity besting whatever we definitely tighten that up over the last several months as we got farther past the R&D heavy lift part and wanted to get tighter on a core yeah I don't even really know how quite how to answer yeah yeah Jeez so you kind of mentioned this in passing earlier on and you said our first area were attacking kind of with this model of utilizing social connections and these models is email I'm curious if you have and it's okay if you're like yeah that's a little not gonna talk about our next steps but if you are willing to I'm curious what other applications you're thinking you would potentially pivot to with this Xylo idea yeah I love it um so you know one email is the most successful communication platform in the history of the world like by a very wide margin and I think it's easy for those of us in text to get excited and think that that's dead 2 if this is not true and I don't maybe maybe someday but that's where the users are and especially that's where the non adoptive users are which is what we're really trying to build this war so be natural for folks that aren't like us getting all nerdy about AI right uh so on the one hand I don't I don't know that we're ever gonna have to expand too much TV uh on the other hand yes I see this as I mentioned specificity and then the social aspect the principles the first principles were building on have applications really to almost any use of AI um but specifically within communication and written communication we're building um a web application that can integrate not just to your Microsoft but also to your Gmail that eventually we will probably do probably teams would come after and then Slack etc um but we do we do have an intention that this is there will be this this um central hub that has integration to whatever you're using but that so that if you want you can go to one place to see your models your relationships hmm needing to be flawless like stupid flawless so we're gonna do it one at a time and we're gonna we're gonna go slow to go fast so I had a question um and this is perhaps out of the scope of of Xylo um but a very common problem in today's business world is uh fishing and spearfishing campaigns are becoming more and more sophisticated um but what's the difference between spearfishing so spearfishing is just when they're going after like a very specific individual so it's like you know they they know they want to hit the CTO at Xylo so they bump um so I'd be curious have you guys ever considered any applications of this technology for you know flagging an email as like hey like the way this guy is talking is kind of weird I probably wouldn't do anything he's saying to do without talking to your boss first yeah um so we have a feature we call it Red Flags and I don't think we'll call it Red Flags forever I think that name is terrible haha it's good code code name but essentially it's more on your side words like if I if you're gonna say something offensive hahaha and we have I mentioned that the the rag with the database that we can put your customer input so customer wants to say hey I wanna have Xylo for my team but then I also never want them to use the word guarantee haha we don't make guarantees we can guarantee your team never says the word guarantee haha you can apply that that same kind of functionality we've talked about it to what you're saying Spencer I'm I I'm not sure that like there aren't a bajillion people trying to solve that super specific problem and that I shouldn't be careful but I do think there's applications and I know what you mean about it as an issue yeah that's why I was wondering like I said it seems like it's might be kind of out of scope for you guys cause since you're focused on communication but as you were talking about is like you know like a very common thing with fishing fishing emails is they all kind of have a sort of a signature to them of you know things are praised properly but not not quite normally you know um so I mentioned why I haven't like overly pursuing even though it's been there and I also thought like look if we can figure out how to do it low lift enough it really makes sense with the platform building for email and like yeah so like but I never heard that idea that you just mentioned there you so I'm stealing it so yeah go go for it go for it haha that is what something were I thought about like oh we're positioned from a positioning standpoint right doing that which we can and probably will do is table stakes but saying hey this guy's this guy's got the ick haha call the X scan hahaha oh man so yeah there you go haha um obviously there's so much going on and he sometimes he comes in and demands to yeah sometimes he comes in and demands to join yeah that's right that's a big cat found them in the dirt anyways Jake what was your question yeah no you're good I was I was gonna ask um obviously it's moving so fast and a big worry especially as we've talked to a lot of these other founders is yeah we're working on this tool we just talked to somebody like last week and he had put all this work into a product and literally as he was like seeking investors Google released something that just knocked the legs out from Andre and he's like alright well that was that pivot to something else um I love you you know like stealing this and taking it haha that's actually the right question though everybody asks it might say a couple things what I'm gonna say this is one thing I keep up in my office be brave yeah yes so but the other and I think that that's part of a a benefit to us what people think you can't go do what you're doing it were proved by Microsoft we're certified by Microsoft we have free credits for Microsoft we have a patent hmm the the surface um and so we have those protections patent especially being what I like to call her speak softly and carry a big stick Protection haha it's really different than what they're doing so it's easy to look at it because the features and I think it's gonna be easy to look at a lot of solutions or a lot of products and and mistakenly conflate them with something else because the tablesticks features look the same what are you all these things can do this this this like that's the baseline that's the new web right it's here we go it's what do you do with them and your positioning as a noun as a noun yeah so what is ours psychology human communication working better together does that sound like Microsoft haha haha and they want Azure consumption and they want a cat right they're just yeah and they want folks like us to add richness to their platform to help them compete with the others so I have never once I've seen that and I don't even disagree with you saying by the way you do see that all the time but that's when people don't take care of their positioning they don't do the verb positioning to get to the noun positioning so they have no real positioning and then when somebody release a feature that similar to theirs their FT right so um yeah believe it or not I'm really not worried about that I'm just worried about executing right gotta execute we gotta with market ah it's yeah yeah execution is the only note there is really that's something that I've Learned over and over again as I've grown I love that that's a great way to put it um uh do you guys have any plans to ever do any type of auto reply feature or is this always the idea is always keep a human in the loop we're always enhancing human communication specifically you guys don't mind if I go get a cuppa do you no not at all go for it I I'm famous on my team for never sitting still so you're I love you um so do we have auto reply yes so um I think I showed you guys before we started the call a little bit in the product oh and I'll just mention the guys said hey you could you could show it I'm like yeah I want people to go check it out themselves so go to the website solid out AI check it out download if you're a Microsoft person um or sign up for the Gmail wait list um but I do think there will be auto reply eventually so right now we have rewrite and we have quick draft and rewrite will say um you wrote your email and you wanna make it better it's especially what we see people using a lot for it's a high leverage emails to important folks little complex they want they don't wanna take so long people agonize over an email I don't know if you guys have been involved like this for half hour hour right and we can turn that into 5 minutes hmm hmm do your best it's not perfect you can write sloppy email and then hit hit rewrite and boom cleans it up does it your voice right so that's rewrite that's if you're getting a lot of input now go down the step one more which is less input our quick draft allows you to save prompt templates we can you can we have like a like a speak like Hulk one just for fun ha ha answer in the affirmative like Hulk Hulk yes uh hmm hmm but that that that prompt box ability um that that's there now auto replies the next one we have considered where you just click and it just response and we already have that functionality um I'm curious my question is still to the team when do we wanna release that is it really what we're about yeah right hahaha but not sure if it yeah what do you guys think I'm always I love to hear like now this is this is exactly why I ask cause I think that this is kind of one of the the fundamental questions that every AI product is going to have to answer for themselves is like are we a human the loop product or are we a fully autonomous um here's your buddy Xylo who will answer all of your emails for you um yeah and that I mean maybe that even answers my question I mean haha no right yeah exactly like it's it's a hard line to walk where it's like um is giving people that ability then kinda shifting the incentives for the product away from what you wanted to be but also the same time like you want to give people lots of options um because right now with a human in the loop you sidestep a lot of um liability whereas if all of a sudden a reply is sent by Xylo in whatever way all of a sudden maybe you're shouldering more of that liability haha hmm it's tricky I don't know and then yeah for us as we're definitely him in the loop I just human loop is is I don't know what do you guys think not just for us but in general like are we really ever going to place before autonomy in most tasks I'm not so sure I think folks would jump ahead on that and some tasks hey uh huh but like with language it's still just a word calculator still just guessing you know how it's hard for me to imagine that maybe I'm wrong maybe I'm wrong but at least at where it's at now and we're pretty close to the forefront I I don't see it not really I think that it's gonna be it's going to have to be human in the loop for a while just because simply because like it is it's gonna be incredibly expensive to spin up and maintain the infrastructure necessary to observe and monitor you know however many AI agents you have running uh cause you need that visibility like that's that's something that I think people overrate when you know they're talking about like the potential of AI to replace jobs is uh middle management does have does actually have a role like you know they're much aligned and sometime often for good reason right but it's like ultimately like there is a role for middle management and AI agents are gonna are gonna take off until the supervisory architecture cost less than a middle manager um cause you need you need some level of that grunt management of like are you on task you know cracking the whip and all that I like that it's middle management like yeah yeah and and and right now I mean I can think of other things we do like we're trying to do this is AI we're trying to build process for marketing or whatever well when you're building process if you trust too much in the process and you don't actually go down to the studs on something you you things fall through the cracks haha and it's kind of like that with the eye we get excited about automating it it's like well yeah you got to really like put a lot of wrenching into that process to really trust it and can you still trust it and then does that cost less than just hired a couple dudes hmm haha I think is also necessary just for adoption I think particularly the older yeah I really don't miss you just because nobody is gonna trust it no one's gonna want yeah so I think it's ness and you know we have we've talked to some very optimistic people who think AGI is not that far away and maybe who knows it could happen haha you know what would you say hahaha I'll just leave it at that I'll get myself in trouble for me I just I think it's it's a term somebody made up I think there's some it's fine we're getting it's getting smarter this is oh my God I think the fundamental error people that are talking about that make and actually a lot of people in there even the people on the other side that are worried about AI and don't wanna use it may as well as they think this thing is sentient dude hahaha she's mad when is just math can make people's jobs faster it can elevate their role but you need that decision maker and that creative thinker stop I think it's insulting to human beings it tells us that human beings don't actually bring something to the table anymore because this math machine is gonna do everything it's it's shortsided and it it underrates how important people still are people are still the value creators in a business and in this world um they have a better tool now great uh haha they just we've just given them a way better tool to do yeah yeah I mean a holistic human yeah maybe it can take the bar exam and crush it you know and do better than the average human on the bar exam but like just that yeah the holistic human can't be competed with yet you don't just go around doing bar exams all day right ha ha you're doing the bar exam and you gotta get dinner for like you just there's just too much connection it's the decision hmm hmm you can't you can't because again it's a prediction model it's it's always gonna be looking backwards and making guesses rather than looking forwards and designing something that's better if you but as a analyst right finding something and thinking about it in a way differently yeah hahaha I know you guys this is like the it is the stuff that it's doing outside of just a natural language um is is really incredible on how it it I do really believe it's gonna change medicine uh huh change space exploration has changed a lot of really really big especially scientific and kind of mathematical in nature stuff that has a huge data sets and and that just need to get crunched I mean yeah for me what I am really optimist about well optimist optimist about a lot but I do think that I think that AI kind of has the potential to elevate psychology um beyond where it is um and we'll see if that bears out um I'm hopeful uh did you tell me more what you mean obviously that's in our space yeah what do you mean yeah so essentially um so I mean there's the whole replicatability in crisis and in psychology and this is a little bit of a half peak thought admittedly um yeah exactly uh so into me I see a lot of parallels between AI and the invention of the printing press um where we suddenly have a radically new and more durable way of storing and reproducing information um and in doing so that LED to you know the the evolution of alchemy into a proper science and it became chemistry right um and so I kinda see AI as as being in a similar space where it's a whole new way to encode information about the human mind that potentially makes it more interpretable to psychology to psychiatrist I just yeah I just firmly believe that every every step we take further along and understanding cognitive processes we get closer to unlocking you know how to how to actually fix schizophrenia how to actually solve severe anxiety depression etc um anyways hahaha that is an aspect of what we're doing with grabbing I mean again we're able with a relatively small amount of text to do what we're doing you know yeah it's amazing it's really cool we can start to do stuff like this I mean you you think about like the movies where it's like a Ransom note right hahaha tell something about somebody by how they by their handwriting or by their actual copywriting and by doing that you know we're applying it in the workplace but like you're talking about could could we say hey you don't give us a lot of writing put it in this model and we could actually do more with that yeah yeah yeah that'd be fascinating hmm well I know we're we're getting close can I give you one more uh you brought up the printing dress I wear this around my neck it's a feistose disc you guys know what a feistose disc is so um Crete I think it's Crete somewhere now one of those islands like 15 years before Gutenberg's printing press there's a a disc they found about this big that this this person must have made a movable type to create this um 15 years before but nothing really ever came of it why when you invent something cool the printing press you also need it needs the right moment in time it needs the right market it needs the right distribution all of these things so why why did this just like come on we don't even know for sure right um why was Gutenberg's press so powerful there's a lot of reasons why right and it didn't just have to do with the invention so there's the invention and then there is how do you bring it to market and how do you crack the code to help that innovative thing become a necessity in people's lives right that's what we're doing but AI yeah hahaha that don't want to touch how do you do that you have to design something so that's what we're doing that's it I wanna touch on that real really quick um because this is this is a problem that I see constantly with with AI founders um you know I I'm on Twitter a lot I'm online a lot I see just about every new AI startup that gets launched um and so many of them are designing things that people don't want haha it's like dudes like go out there talk to people like they don't want what you're selling like like I I I think that I mentioned this in another episode but I saw one the other day where it's like someone spun up a a social network where you sign up and you automatically have thousands of like AI generated followers and like who do you think what's this man like this is like this is a fun research project this is not this is not a product dude like what are you doing with your life oh my God that's where you mentioned earlier me as an advantage for us for me is not being that technical and having that moment and honestly kind of stubbornly staying on technical yeah and otherwise we're just yeah we're building shit we think is cool sorry hahaha yeah it's so true and it's the like you said now is the this unique time where I feel like the environment has been been built everyone's wanting AI applications but it just has to be built in the right way and it sounds like Xylo is really focused on that yeah had a company on in our first season called Game G a I m and almost their whole focus is appealing to non technical users it's like let's bring AI and just make it accessible let's just make AI accessible to everybody and I think love you has to have at least an undertone of that thought process otherwise it's going nowhere the the percentage of the population that knows what rag means ha ha let alone that actually can grasp how an LLM works like it's just you gotta you gotta start with people it still starts with people that's what it comes to you know it all it just comes back to people yeah you're so right you're so right yeah we got it we have to be talking founders you know if you guys founders listen to this just my number one thing like just talk to users man talk to users look at the data like I sort of it just haha it's awesome thank you I I'm sorry we went long and I've no no worries this is perfect um before you jump off quickly if people want to follow Xylo want to follow you what would be the best platforms to do that on yeah you mentioned Twitter I'm I'm embarrassed to say I'm such a lot I I don't have a Twitter and I haha haha you can follow me Zach Underson Z a C H and um and then Xylo Xylo AI Xylo AI uh but we'll since it go to the website go to website check us out xylo dot AI Xylo dot AI um we've got an app source if you're a Microsoft user go and get downloaded and if you're not like I said sign up for that like wait list and we'll be blasting stuff out as our web application and Gmail stuff is ready that folks wanna try as well um yeah yeah if you want to reach out to me also like your fellow founder want advice want to have a conversation I just I believe I believe we're all in this together and I think that like interactions are really important so anybody wants to reach out I'll have a conversation thank you so much for joining us Zach yeah thank you Zach this is wonderful yeah we'll stay in contact let's do it peace