Double Debuts Its AI Assistant for Executive Assistants

Remote assistant service Double has debuted an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tool.

Announced Wednesday (Sept. 13), the company’s Mingo uses AI to confirm that key tasks are fully captured, summarize important details from a request and offer executive assistants (EAs) suggestions on the next steps they can take. 

“Even the most skilled executive assistants, and the most well-meaning executive, can find themselves grappling with unclear task parameters,” the company said in a news release.

“This can result in multiple follow-up discussions that slow execution. Double developed Mingo to combat this common challenge and to streamline communication for maximum productivity.”

According to the release, Mingo can ensure details for a task are collected in real-time, “for easy hand-offs to assistants,” while also prompting executives with clarifying follow-up questions to anticipate their needs in advance.

The AI is able to suggest the next steps by “referencing a broad knowledge base of how-tos and best practices” on various tasks an assistant might have, based on the company’s expertise. 

“We developed Mingo as our first AI product to unlock new ways for executives and their assistants to stay in sync while optimizing productivity,” said Alice Default, Double’s co-founder and CEO.

“Extending the efficiencies of AI to our busy executives and their top-quality human EAs represents a natural evolution of our commitment to deliver greater levels of execution, through ever-more productive delegation,” she said. 

As PYMNTS noted earlier this year, experts interviewed here have stressed again and again that AI should be seen as a way to augment and enhance the work done by employees, rather than as a way to replace them.

That’s because although the learning capabilities of modern AI have gotten to the technical tipping point where modern algorithms can turn large datasets into projects that augment, enhance and revolutionize business processes, some managers contend that there will always be the need to verify AI-driven outputs by having a human employee in the loop. 

“After all, AI doesn’t replace labor outright,” that report said. “Rather, it transforms how work is organized and activates previously blocked process efficiencies by bringing multimodal processes together under one roof and streamlining that output.”