IrisGo, a startup backed by Andrew Ng, looks to become the AI desktop buddy you never knew you needed

Key points

• Industry insiders say the next big thing in AI is “proactive” systems: agents that can anticipate a user’s needs — and fulfill them — before the user even knows what those needs are.
• One startup that’s looking to make headway in this area is IrisGo.
• The company, which closed a $2.8 million seed round led by Andrew Ng’s AI Fund earlier this year, is building a desktop companion for PCs that can learn about a user’s daily workflows and then automate them with limited to no human prompting.
• IrisGo was co-founded by Jeffrey Lai, a former Apple engineer who helped to build the Chinese language version of Siri, the company’s automated assistant.
• (Somewhat slyly, Iris is Siri spelled backward.) The core idea is simple: Show the program how to do something once, and it remembers that process for future automated use — no repeat instructions needed.