I used an artificial intelligent scheduling-bot to help book 8 meetings with 11 people this week and you will too.

EDIT: Amy is now out of BETA - and yes, you can subscribe for $42 per month.  Here's the ROI math from x.ai:

"Say you make $90,000 a year and schedule 8 meetings a week.
Each meeting takes about 3.5 emails to negotiate.
And you spend 5 minutes writing each scheduling related email.
That’s 8 x 3.5 x 5 = 2.33 hrs/week or about 10 hrs/month spent scheduling meetings.

Your hourly rate is
$90,000 x 40% (tax & overhead)/1,800 (work hours in a year) = $70/hr

Which means you’re investing $700 every month into meeting scheduling. At that rate, $39/month seems like a bargain (or 1,700% ROI)."

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I am one of the lucky ones who got selected for the https://x.ai/, Artificial Intelligence that schedules meetings for you - beta program. And I am now convinced this simple smart service is only the beginning of how AI will help us be more successful in the future. And it's awesome.

Amy saved me about 6 hours last week from having to do the silly email banter that we all have gotten used to as the thing we have to do in order to schedule a conversation or meet-up with the people we are doing business with. I leave that banter to Amy now.  I just CC Amy (or Andrew, however you want to personify it) on any email to anyone I want her to try and coordinate a time/date with - and let my contact know that she will be in touch to coordinate a time for a call.

That's it. The rest is magic. It has worked perfectly.

My prediction is that this type of service will be the single largest B2B productivity improvement thing in 2017. There are so many awesome things for me to rave about this new service. Here are MY ELEVEN FAVORITE. (But for a more in-depth point-by-point write up on how the service works, see this article from smallbiztrends.)

Greg's Eleven Favorite Things About Amy

[1] Amy will email them up to three times over the course of 5 days (and not CC me each time so to not clutter my inbox) trying to suggest a time that might work for them. After three, she/he/it? gives up and lets me know about it in case I want to try and initiate another meeting with them. This means that I can invite-and-forget and Amy will see to it that the meeting gets scheduled. This alone is a huge time and effort saver eliminating the need to go back and re-email folks to try and schedule that meeting after you've heard nothing from them after a couple of days.

[2] I can just email Amy my preferences. For example, I can just email Amy and say, "I'm taking off next week a few days, from Tuesday through Thursday - so don't book anything then." And like magic, I get an email right back confirming my scheduling preference and acknowledging that she/it won't book any meetings during that time.

[3] I can have Amy try to book like 92 meetings - and like a terminator, she will not stop until those meetings are booked. (OK, it will stop after the third attempt no response is received.)

[4] I can CC several people and she will talk with everyone in order to find a common time/date that works with everyone and everyone agrees. This is especially useful if you want to speak to 2 or 3 people who are with 2 or 3 different organizations that don't share calendaring systems and can't check each others calendars. 

[5] I can schedule meetings from my different email addresses - some personal, some business. And she sends the calendar invite to the address which I sent the first "Lets schedule a meeting" email from.

[6] I can have Amy monitor several of my calendars at the same time - by giving her access to those calendars she can suggest times to the people I want to meet with that are free.

[7] I can have Amy learn my call preferences. So for example, if I email one person my preference is to call them at their number so she will get their number. If I email one person with several on the CC line, she will know that it will be a conference call and she automatically includes my conference call dial in number and passcode.

[8] I can have Amy understand where my home, work or favorite coffee spot is - so if I say to Bob, lets meet at my office - Amy will put in the calendar invite the exact address of my office.

[9] I get a weekly report from Amy - telling me how many meetings were booked, how many are waiting for responses.

[10] I love the simple and intuitive user interface of only 5 options, Calendars, Scheduling, Emails, Personal, Locations. 

[11] Some people see that Amy is a bot. Most don't, and talk to her about what time and dates work best for them with the same respect that you would expect people to give other humans, not machines. It's a brave new world.

Amy Ingram has taken a burden off of my time - and allowed me to show up focused and ready and more organized for my meetings without all the flub-bub back-and-forth-this-day-works-but-that-day-doesn't  typically needed to schedule a meeting. I understand that Amy.xi will be available for public use in the fall for a monthly fee per month, and there will be several customizable features that businesses will love. For example having it come from your business email address instead of Amy.x.ai

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Stay tuned for my next post on using Charlie - (www.charlieapp.com) an ambient info AI bot which helps me prepare for meetings I'm about to have.