‘It’s a total game-changer’: AI enters the household

Every Sunday, Tiffany Morris Palazzo receives a scheduled report of what the coming week will be like for her family.

The weekly report might flag things like whether she has Pilates and strength-training workouts scheduled, if she and her husband have a date night on the books for which they need a babysitter, and if their two daughters — nine and 10 years old — have early dismissal from school.

Palazzo’s report is automatically generated each week by Claude Cowork, an AI platform that’s agentic, meaning that it can execute tasks and make decisions on behalf of users. Claude Cowork, for example, generates Palazzo’s report based on a brief she supplies along with information Cowork finds in her email and calendars.

“There’s so much mental load when I start my work week,” Palazzo, a 46-year-old attorney based in Virginia and the founder of a legal firm, says. “All the things I’m thinking about for work and clients, layered on what I’m thinking about for my kids and family life. Being able to extract and consolidate information in a way that makes it immediately actionable is a total game changer.”

Palazzo is part of a wave of parents, mostly mothers, who are using generative AI to help them organise their families’ schedules and automate or ease mundane, time-consuming household tasks. This growing user base might signal a narrowing of the so-called AI gender gap (studies around the world have shown that women are less likely to adopt AI than men).

Tech companies are certainly betting on it. In January, OpenAI’s chief economist told the FT that one of his goals for the year was to figure out how to measure domestic labour, and that “unpaid housework”, which mostly falls on women, likely equates to about 15 per cent of global GDP. Anthropic published a survey last year that said that Claude, the chatbot, makes processes of food preparation 75 per cent faster. And this spring, Amazon released Alexa+, an AI assistant that functions as a project manager for different technologically enabled objects inside a smart home, such as lightbulbs, speakers and motion sensors.

On social media, mothers are posting about how they use apps such as Ollie, Cozi Max, Town and Ava, as well as chatbots and tools for “vibe coding” (programming without writing code) to streamline their lives.

The most enthusiastic evangelists are people such as Jesse Genet, the former chief executive officer of Lumi, a packaging start-up, who is now a stay-at-home mother. Genet uses five AI agents to manage her seven-child household on a ranch outside Los Angeles. Genet’s AI agents run on several computers to avoid overloading one machine and to protect sensitive data — agentic AI users suggest asking yourself what kind of access you’d offer a human personal assistant and sticking to those boundaries.

I hope we use it to spend more time with our families and in the world, and not outsource the whole benefit of being human, which is connection

I hope we use it to spend more time with our families and in the world, and not outsource the whole benefit of being human, which is connection

Genet’s AI agents can grocery shop for her, create lessons for her children’s home-schooling and fill out forms on her behalf. Claire Vo, the Bay Area-based host of the podcast “How I AI” and founder of an AI start-up, uses nine AI agents to help run her life and has publicly said that “every family deserves a family agent”.

While power users such as Genet and Vo are rare, the number of parents who’ve threaded AI into their home lives is growing. Laura Nolan, 42, a healthcare researcher and consultant in the Bay Area, used Claude to compile a research report and comparison table on different options for a family car. Chase Hall, 37, a senior product manager who lives in Ridgefield, Connecticut, employed Lovable, an AI tool that allows users to build websites through written prompts, to create schedules for his two-year-old son’s three babysitters and to calculate when, how and how much to pay each of them.

Elizabeth Shaffer, vice-president of product and co-founder of Thoughtful based in Westchester County, New York, has three daughters, an infant and a seven- and a nine-year-old. Shaffer, 39, used Lovable to create a family website for herself, her husband and their au pair. The website includes household rules, the schedules for the children, the baby’s weaning plan and an address book with important contacts. She also created a tool that scans emails and adds events to the calendar in bulk.

To simplify meal planning, Shaffer devised a tool that allows her to designate certain recipes to different days of the week and use that meal plan to construct a shopping list. Then, she copies and pastes the shopping list into ChatGPT, which adds all the items to her Instacart, a grocery delivery website.

Shaffer sees “huge” potential for parents to use AI to improve their lives “in the same ways that appliances like washing machines and dishwashers did”, she says. “Millennials parent really hard. My kids do way more activities, and the schools have way more going on than when I was a kid. We have really high standards for ourselves as parents, and I think it’s led naturally to this sense of overwhelm.”

Pre-configured, easy-to-use AI tools that are designed specifically for parents, such as Ava, a subscription-based AI assistant, are also coming to market. Co-founder Laura Cunningham had the idea to create the tool while juggling the needs of her family with a previous high-intensity job in AI product strategy.

“I went through a quarter of feeling like I was dropping all of the balls around my family life,” Cunningham says. After experiencing feelings of guilt, anxiety and depression, she had a revelation when she realised how many AI tools were being built for the office but not for the home.

“Big tech has been largely built by men and built around use cases that are not focused on what’s been traditionally feminised work and labour,” Cunningham says. But now, she says, women have a chance to use the technology to solve more urgent, everyday problems.

Cunningham uses Ava to keep track of her seven- and nine-year-olds’ schedules, receive automatic reminders for important tasks, record voice memos for grocery and to-do lists that Ava builds out on its own, and upload school and sports calendars by simply taking a photo.

Where is it all going? Ideally, towards more face time.

“Everybody is trying to figure out, how do we use this technology for good?” says Nolan. “I hope we use it to spend more time with our families and in the world, and not outsource the whole benefit of being human, which is connection.”

Despite the upsides, integrating AI into family life comes with the same risks as most AI and internet use, such as privacy concerns, especially when children are involved; misinformation; environmental costs; and skill atrophy.

Shreya Gulati, 34, an angel investor and the founder of Moms Build AI, an organisation for women who want to do more with AI, has used the technology to research preschools, plan meals and remind herself to complete various tasks.

“I do think you have to be careful about data protection,” Gulati says. “I have my boundaries about things I’m not comfortable sharing: my medical history, my social security number.”

She adds that it’s important to be thoughtful about the capabilities of AI.

“I really like it for things like research and execution, but I do think there’s a line to maintain around judgments, decision-making, critical thinking,” Gulati says. “If your kid is sick, you might get general guidance [from AI], but at some point, you might need to say, ‘I need a doctor’.”

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