The company behind Amy Ingram, the realistic AI personal assistant, is launching an enterprise edition
To use the virtual PA - which also comes in an "Andrew Ingram" version and has been available to individuals since 2015 - users link their calendars to the service and then CC amy@x.ai or andrew@x.ai whenever they are setting up a meeting. Amy or Andrew then take over and chat to the contact like a real PA in order to organize the most convenient rendezvous.
As Business Insider has previously reported, many people on the receiving end of emails from the Ingrams have been fooled into thinking they were speaking to a real PA - so much so that "Amy" has even been sent gifts.
X.ai now has three tiers: A free edition that allows you to set up five meetings per month, a professional edition that allows individuals to set up unlimited meetings for $39 per month, and now the enterprise edition which will charge a fee of $59 "per seat" per month for every monthly active user.
Dennis Mortensen, X.ai founder and CEO, told Business Insider: "We initially started out with the idea that we would be doing traditional Salesforce-like per seat billing where if a company takes 11 seats, I will bill them 11-times the price of the seat per month. But we moved over to a fair billing model, very much like Slack - if anything, they should take credit for it. Conceptually, I don't think we will make more or less by putting that in place but the ease at which we have been able to speak to some of these companies changed. They can add users willy nilly and if they don't use it, they don't pay for it."
The enterprise edition also offers some extra features, including a dashboard for admins that gives an overview of how many meetings their team has set up that week.
Admins can also add Amy on Andrew to their own domains - andrew@businessinsider.com, for example - so their email address appears to look like a real member of staff.
Mortensen declined to comment on how many users X.ai has so far but said the company is setting up hundreds of thousands of meetings a year.
In 2017 he hopes to expand X.ai's technology to work with all calendars - it doesn't currently support Microsoft Exchange or iCloud, for example - and the company is setting itself some aggressive revenue targets.
Mortensen said: "There are two interesting milestones for most SaaS (software as a service) startups: You need to get to $1 million annual recurring revenue because that suggests there is a product there and there is market. Whether we can scale it is a different question. We almost immediately got there with [our professional edition]. The next milestone is to get this to $10 million. There could be a $100 million business in this. We are trying to run towards that as quick as we can in 2017. Once we add $10 million in recurring revenue, it's hard to imagine we can't get to a much larger model."
X.ai has raised $34 million in funding to date. The company is based in New York and currently has around 90 members of staff.