В Сан-Диего запустили ИИ-помощника для родителей и пожилых людей, работающего через SMS

SAN DIEGO – Christine Landis isn’t letting retirement stop her from entrepreneurship. Through her parental support and resource platform Peacock Parent, Landis’ goal is to help parents gain more time for what’s most important to them, while delegating other tasks that are important for managing a familial household. “It was just this concept of, why are we not delegating and outsourcing at home like we do at work? That was really the question that I started with: is it a money issue only?” Landis said. “The first objection is sure, it costs money, but it was also a permission issue I found for people of, can I value my time that way? Am I allowed to say I don’t want to do it all?” Last month, Peacock Parent launched its newest feature, Ask Proxy, a personal artificial intelligence assistant that helps manage the daily demands of running a household, keep track of upcoming events like birthday and holidays and avoid becoming overwhelmed by too many details, decisions and unfinished tasks. However, Proxy differs from a typical AI chatbot or agentic system by working purely via text message, enabling users to avoid writing a prompt or downloading or opening an app. “I just want to be able to pull up my phone, I can send a quick voice memo, I can voice-to-text,” Landis said. “I can really treat it like this friend, but someone who can assist with my thinking.” Running a Home Like a Business Landis is no stranger to growing a successful company – it runs in her family. She’s the daughter of Diane Hunt, the former CEO of the casino industry underwriting information services company National Cred-A-Chek, or NCC. Landis took over the company in 2010 after the sudden death of her mother, who founded NCC in 1976, and sought to bring it into the 21st century, turning NCC into a technology-driven resource for financial intelligence reports for more than 300 casino operators around the world. After turning down acquisition offers for several years, Landis sold NCC for an undisclosed eight-figure sum in 2018 to Las Vegas-based NRT Technology Corp. and opted to focus on raising a family after having her first child. “I just naturally was kind of running my home like a business,” she said. “I was still valuing my time; even though I was technically a stay-at-home mom, I very much still felt like my time is money.” That transition to domesticity, and an acceptance that she couldn’t possibly be an expert in all aspects of parenting, led Landis to seek support from outside sources like newborn care specialists, parenting coaches, travel agents and housekeepers “I found myself assigning tasks, very much as almost a personal assistant role, kind of creating this family assistant concept,” she said. “It definitely existed, I did not create that term by any means, but I didn’t know about it at the time.” The search for support in tasks like vetting familial service workers led Landis to found Peacock Parent in 2023, with the goal of normalizing parents asking for help and delegating even mundane tasks like taking trash cans out to the curb in the pursuit of spending more time with their children. That goal ultimately led to the development of Proxy, as Landis argued parents may not even know what they don’t know when searching for a family assistant or a home management service. “Even these powerhouses at their jobs that have an executive assistant at their own company, they still felt really uncomfortable with the concept of having someone in their space, or even having the overwhelm of managing someone else at home when they already do that at work,” she said. Addresses Privacy Concerns After making their unique profile, Proxy users can begin texting immediately, whether it’s to schedule reminders to complete regular tasks, provide meal ideas by analyzing a photo of a user’s refrigerator or helping to plan travel logistics for family outings. Proxy was also developed as a private platform, according to Landis, searching on the user’s behalf and creating a layer of anonymity between a user and the websites, search engines and other AI platforms that may provide an answer to their query. User data is also never sold, product and service recommendations aren’t influenced by advertisements and conversations are not used to train the platform’s public AI models, according to Proxy. As a result, users can also share private information about their lives, such as financial or romantic issues, which will be kept siloed only to that user’s experience with the platform, but will help Proxy become more personalized to each individual user. “You can go on Reddit if you want to hear 16 different peoples’ opinions and have the average case scenario of that, you can go to Yahoo or Yelp reviews to do the same thing,” Landis said. “I personally don’t find those as helpful because it doesn’t feel like it speaks to me.” Assisting Elderly More Easily In addition to overwhelmed parents and families, Proxy was also designed as an easier way for older adults to try using AI without having to understand the complex math that undergirds popular AI chatbots like ChatGPT. Landis argued that no one is building AI services for older adults who aren’t technologically savvy, even if they’re curious about the technology itself. “They want to be empowered and they want to still remain independent, and yet right now, they’re having to Google everything and it takes a long time to go through that Google rabbit hole,” she said. “So this was a nice way to make them feel like someone’s there supporting me, looking after me, checking in on me a little bit, and it’s also a space that I can trust.” Proxy is available throughout the U.S. and Canada and has its own web and social media presence, which Landis said was intentional even if Proxy remains a product of Peacock Parent and is never spun off into its own entity. Both Proxy and Peacock Parent have been self-funded endeavors for Landis, in part because she hasn’t wanted to involve the competing interests of third-party investors or promise more than she can deliver to chase a return on that outside investment. Landis said one of her dream goals for Proxy would be for employers to offer it as a perk so that every employee can have their own AI-based personal assistant. She added that Proxy is already in discussions with a local car wash chain to provide the platform to the company’s workers. “The actual employees that are washing the cars and helping maintain the equipment, were they ever thinking to themselves, ‘I’m going to have a personal assistant in my life someday’?” But that’s possible and it’s feasible,” Landis said. “Something that is actually helping look ahead and think for them and come up with solutions to their day-to-day grind, I think is really powerful.” Peacock Parent FOUNDED: 2023 CEO: Christine Landis HEADQUARTERS: San Diego BUSINESS: Support and resource platform for parents WEBSITE: peacockparent.com CONTACT: [email protected] NOTABLE: Landis is the former CEO of casino industry underwriting information services company National Cred-A-Chek. Eli is an award-winning reporter primarily covering the tech and life sciences industries. He previously worked as the San Diego City Hall reporter for the regional wire City News Service. He has also covered public health, transportation and state and local politics in the San Francisco Bay Area for Local News Matters, the nonprofit arm of the regional wire Bay City News Service, where he also oversaw the development and daily content management of the outlet’s public health and COVID-19 news and resource webpage. He is also a contributing writer covering Minor League Baseball for the analysis and commentary website Baseball Prospectus. Eli is a graduate of San Francisco State University and a native of Northern California.