Woven, co-founded by two Facebook alumni, including its former CIO, announced an AI-based calendar system
Timothy Campos, former chief information officer for Facebook Inc., has unveiled the secretive startup he’s been working on for two years: a Mountain View, Calif.-based company that offers artificial intelligence-enabled calendar software.
The company, Woven, aims to attract busy professionals without administrative assistants, for whom scheduling is a pain point. But in the future, Woven aims to make money from enterprise-level executives who are interested in understanding how they spend their time, and how their employees spend their time, with the goal of boosting productivity.
“Our vision is that this becomes an indispensable component of how companies manage time,” said Mr. Campos, co-founder and chief executive of Woven.
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Woven, built on Alphabet Inc.’s Google Cloud Platform, can begin scheduling events automatically by using AI to detect scheduling conversations between users in Google’s Gmail, or by responding to the command “@Woven” in email. The software pulls data from Google Maps about travel times and factors in the time of day to allow for flexibility and travel between meetings. Like the collaboration features in Google Docs, Woven allows users to make changes to the location and date in real-time, without resorting to multiple email exchanges.
The AI system was built in-house and understands enough context to know what specific date, month and year a user means when they ask Woven to get a meeting scheduled for, say, Tuesday. Eventually, advancements could allow for the AI system to choose a convenient time based on a specific location and suggest other participants that should be included in a meeting. As the system learns about the people and tasks that are important to users, it could suggest ways to reorganize time to prioritize certain meetings, Mr. Campos said.
The startup, also co-founded by Burc Arpat, a former engineering leader at Facebook and Google, has raised $4.8 million in venture capital funding and has 12 employees. Mr. Campos spoke to CIO Journal about the problem Woven is trying to solve, the transition from CIO to CEO and whether he thinks his AI-based calendar system will replace personal assistants. Edited excerpts follow.
What’s the problem you’re trying to solve with Woven?
I spent a huge amount of time dealing with calendaring problems (at Facebook). The first 15 minutes of any executive conversation would be a tirade of them telling me all the problems they were having with their calendar — events dropping off, their mobile calendar wasn’t synced. At Facebook, executives were constantly interested in answering the question: How did they spend their time? Give me a report that says how much time I spend with customers, employees and other people in the company. We couldn’t easily do it. (With Woven) we’re keeping the existing calendaring systems. Microsoft and Google aren’t going anywhere, they have great products. But we’re anointing some superpowers.
How will Woven ultimately add business value for the enterprise?
It goes back to the core premise of productivity, particularly for knowledge workers. Productivity is a function of what they get done and how much time it takes. We think one of the first ways we can add value to the enterprise is by answering questions about how people spend time. People can tag their meetings — this is a customer meeting, this is an interview, a project meeting. We can use those tags that people apply to get further granularity on how time is being allocated. Executives oftentimes already do this by using different colors (for meetings). Our vision is that this becomes an indispensable component of how companies manage time. For an organization that’s sales-driven, that would mean making it so that the salespeople are spending the right time with the right customers. In product development, it makes sure the engineers of the company aren’t interrupted any more than they have to be to get their jobs done.
Will this technology replace personal assistants or admins for executives?
I don’t think so. This might save assistants tons of time so they can support a ton more people, but most calendar activity actually involves a relationship. When you put a machine between the humans it makes that relationship very impersonal. There are certain contexts where that’s fine. But in recruiting, for example, you’d still want a point of contact for a candidate to talk to if they have any questions. If that point of contact is a machine, that’s only going to lead to frustration and disappointment for the candidate.
Who are Woven’s competitors?
There’s nothing that’s a mashup of all the technologies we’re using. The biggest competitor for us is the status quo. You build up behaviors and habits to take full advantage of a product and you have to think a little bit differently of how you’d collaborate with people. That’s one of the reasons we invested so much in design.
What are some skills you learned as CIO that were useful to becoming CEO?
Things like how you negotiate with vendors and suppliers turn out to be similar when you’re dealing with investors as well as suppliers. This is also a leadership issue. Startup (founders) are required to tell a story, to attract talent, to get people excited about what you’re doing, and in many respects it’s the same skill set a CIO has to deal with in order to get attention, funding and support for the initiatives that they’re driving at their organizations.
What was the biggest challenge in the transition from CIO to CEO?
A CIO’s customer base is captive. You are the supplier to your employees for technology and you have an audience that is very motivated to come talk to you. As CEO of a startup, people don’t have a personal relationship with us, at least not yet. We have to focus a lot more on marketing, talking about who we are, making the product easy to use and understand, and the go-to-market strategy requires a whole different type of partnership than a CIO needs to bring their internal products to market.
Date: November 14, 2018
Source: WSJ