The future of work will be a lot better place because many of the mundane tasks people hate to do will be replaced by ML and AI.
The best example is chatbots. It’s a tedious job to respond to the same question over and over such as, “What are your Thanksgiving hours?. It’s much better to let the AI/software handle these sorts of queries and let the humans handle the interesting work like – “What do you suggest as a present for Father’s Day for the man that has everything?”
These sorts of innovations fall under the Future of Work (FoW) category and they represent a giant change in how business will operate.
We are happy to report on a new innovation in the FoW space.
In fact, the task it transforms is so tedious – almost no one does it. Reorganizing a calendar to free up blocks of time for serious work is not something people think is possible. Even with an assistant, it is difficult to pull off.
One way of achieving this goal is to not take meetings in the mornings or afternoons but this doesn’t mean others are available when it makes sense for the meeting organizer.
This is where Clockwise comes in. They just announced $11M in funding.
According to CEO Matt Martin:
If, overnight, meetings rearranged to open up hours of productivity; scheduling conflicts were automatically resolved; travel time was accounted for; and personal obligations were protected as part of your day, with time to spare. What if you woke up to a calendar that reflected what matters to you?
Today, after two years of focused work, I’m incredibly proud to announce the launch of a system that delivers just that: Clockwise. We’re also excited to announce the over $13 million in funding we’ve raised to date from Steve Loughlin at Accel, who led our seed round and co-led our Series A funding; John Lilly at Greylock Partners, our other Series A co-lead; and some more amazing partners including Slack Fund, Michael Ovitz, Ellen Levy, George Hu, Soraya Darabi, SV Angel, and Jay Simons.
Many people hate scheduling – managing meetings and other tasks is very difficult and since it tries to organize things in flux, it feels like the job is never done.
As a result – poorly managed schedules can not only suck time from a scheduling perspective but they also can make days unproductive as the meetings take place at times when it would make more sense to be creating, programming, evaluating, proofreading, etc.
This is where Clockwise comes in.
According to Matt:
During the private beta leading up to today’s launch, Clockwise created over 12,000 hours of focus time at some truly innovative companies. It resolved over 2,500 double-booked meetings. It protected over 32,000 personal commitments that were synced to office calendars that Clockwise transformed. Lyft alone gained more than a thousand hours of focus time back in just a few months.
Bringing the power of computer intelligence to supercharge schedules a great innovation and we applaud clockwise for boosting our corporate productivity and allowing us to better manage our large blocks of time for creative thinking and other tasks.
Where do organizations go to learn more? The world’s only Future of Work Expo (collocated with the ITEXPO #TechSuperShow) of course. Feb 12-14, 2020 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
