Yes, and that's because the workflow of those people generally requires managing a crazy, dynamic schedule including travel, meetings, comms, etc. Those folks need real humans with long-term memories and incentives to establish trust for managing these high-stakes engagements. Their human assistants might find these things useful, but there's zero chance Bill Gates is having an AI schedule his travel plans or draft his text messages.

OTOH, this isn't an issue for "ordinary people". They go to work, school, children's sports events, etc. If they had an assistant for free, most of them would probably find it difficult to generate enough volume to establish the muscle memory of using them. In my own professional life, this occurred with junior lawyers and legal assistants--the juniors just never found them useful because they didn't need them even though they were available. Even the partners ended up consolidating around sharing a few of them for the same reason.

Down in this thread someone mentions it being an advanced Alexa, which seems apt. Yes, a party novelty but not useful enough to be top of mind in the every day work flow.

I'm not sure how solvable it is. It only takes one screw up to ruin the reputation, and a screw up is basically guaranteed.

The tech has existed for a while but nobody sane wants to be the one who takes responsibility for shipping a version of this thing that's supposed to be actually solid.

Issues I saw with OpenClaw:

- reliability (mostly due to context mgmt), esp. memory, consistency. Probably solvable eventually

- costs, partly solvable with context mgmt, but the way people were using it was "run in the background and do work for me constantly" so it's basically maxing out your Claude sub (or paying hundreds a day), the economics don't work

- you basically had to use Claude to get decent results, hence the costs (this is better now and will improve with time)

- the "my AI agent runs in a sandboxed docker container but I gave it my Gmail password" situation... (The solution is don't do that, lol)

See also simonw's "lethal trifecta":

>private data, untrusted content, and external communication

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/16/the-lethal-trifecta/

The trifecta (prompt injection) is sorta-kinda solved by the latest models from what I understood. (But maybe Pliny the liberator has a different opinion!)

My 2 cents is that so far LLMs have had a bad track record in replacing people in jobs where simple software logic and flowcharts wouldn't do the job.

Its not going to be big. There is no obvious use for them unlike email or the Iphone.

$180 a month is huge for "ordinary people".

So I guess that leaves the in-between people who don't care about spending $180 every month but don't have any personal staff yet or even access to concierge services.

Those human assistants can be held accountable.

The problem is that if you're wealthy enough to hire someone to do your errands, those errands likely aren't very mundane - the exception is a socialite giving their friend a low-effort job, but executive assistants are paid well because their jobs are cognitively demanding.

OTOH a lower-middle-class Joe like me really does have a lot of mundane social/professional errands, which existing software has handled just fine for decades. I suppose on the margins AI might free up 5 minutes here or there around calendar invites / etc, but at the cost of rolling snake eyes and wasting 30 minutes cleaning up mistakes. Even if it never made mistakes, I just don't see the "personal assistant" use case really taking off. And it's not how people use LLMs recreationally.

Really not trying to say that LLM personal assistants are "useless" for most people. But I don't think they'll be "big," for the same reason that Siri and Alexa were overhyped. It's not from lack of capability; the vision is more ho-hum than tech folks seem to realize.

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