Building Permission: Ting’s First Step Into Proactive Scheduling

Hey all,

A new feature from Ting that I thought had some learnings for everyone building in AI.

At 7pm local time yesterday, in 1,000 inboxes across the world, @Meet-Ting sent a proactive message for the first time.

Everything so far with Ting has been reacting to the user's command, so getting CC into an email to help plan, book, reschedule or send meeting invites (multi-party), or sharing schedule or messaging guests on your behalf if just talking directly to Ting (single-player).

We've been using all of those interactions to create memories with the user, which give us a lot more context now, preset preferences, learned preferences and existing calendar contents.

We wanted to start with a simple time management tip based on the insight that starting your week right (upstream) can help with so many common issues we face each week like over-bookings, no time for deep work, last minute reschedules + cancels (downstream).

Anyone can look at a calendar and optimise it easily, so we knew we needed to do better = instant insight by looking at all meetings, their format, how many people attending, internal vs. external, and so on. Then Ting can suggest an optimisation to (hopefully) give you back time, energy or reduce stress.

Everyone is different and we want to serve user goals first and foremost, so some people may want more meetings not less (sales) and other people may just want to be as convenient to their guests as possible (consultants), but it all starts somewhere.

Below you can see some examples and how we moved from surface level to more intelligent tips through testing.

Still a long way to go, but also hopeful this is one feature that offers user value and more retention at the same time.

Do you have any rituals or time habits for each week? Would love to hear them!

Dan

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