While AI might not be ready to completely replace Google Search just yet, it can be helpful in certain situations, such as managing the tedious work associated with completing daily activities like appointment scheduling. That’s the idea behind the recently launched company Skej, which provides an AI assistant you can integrate with your emails to determine the ideal time for everyone to get together.
With Skej, you can find a time to meet without having to search through people’s availability as you would with other scheduling apps like Calendly. Indeed, in the event that you receive a Calendly link from someone, Skej will use it to scan the connection for times that work for both of you and schedule a meeting on your calendars.
“I’ve never met someone who enjoys setting up meetings,” says Paul Canetti, co-founder and CEO of Skej.
In addition to founding and selling the no-code software development platform MAZ Systems, the New York-based serial entrepreneur also worked on Bounce House, a meetings business that Declare Health purchased and relaunched as Clickeasy.com before it was shut down. Through the services of Bounce House, anyone might pay to reserve blocks of time with instructors of yoga or piano.
The founding crew of Skej, which included Canetti, his brother Justin, CTO Anindya Mondal, and a fourth co-founder, Simon Baumer, who passed away from cancer three months after the company was founded in August of last year, rejoined the project. (The team attributes the creation of “the core of the product today” to Simon on an homage page on Skej’s website.)
According to Paul, Calendly is helpful and has grown into a “amazing business,” but he disliked making all of his free time available to the public. He was never really happy with scheduling until he had a human help, such as an EA. A human, as opposed to a digital platform, could quickly comprehend the meaning of meetings and determine whether to rearrange the schedule to accommodate a crucial appointment—even if you were marked as busy, for example. The notion to develop an AI helper that could accomplish the same thing came from that.
You can utilize Skej by adding its email address to your discussion without downloading an app or going to a website. Skej will eventually be able to add a phone number to text conversations. These days, the service is compatible with Gmail, Outlook, and other email clients. It presently works with other apps as well, such as Zoom and Google Calendar, and in the coming weeks, support for Outlook Calendar will be added.
All you have to do to use Skej is add the email to your discussion and ask it to locate a time to meet when you respond. When Paul was asked to schedule an interview with TechCrunch, for instance, he responded, “Skej, can you offer some times that might work this week?” and I received an email from the AI assistant back with options and a link to connect my calendar automatically to select a time. Skej added the meeting to my calendar and answered that it was scheduled after hearing my preference.
Because Paul, the Skej user in this instance, has given the system permission to view his calendar, the system functions. All Skej was doing was sending him the calendar invitation.
But if I had clicked on the provided link, Skej could have scheduled the appointment without my having to contact him again. When a large number of individuals need to collaborate to determine a time slot that works for everyone in the group, the latter method is most effective for internal teams.
Skej uses many LLM models under the hood, including ones that decipher email language and convert it into data that is supplied into Skej’s unique system.
“We refer to it as the brain internally.Because the Skej brain functions much like a marketplace for matching times, Paul compares it to a scheduling engine. Accordingly, he says, “you can have different people in there, in different time zones, with different considerations, conflicts, and preferences.” And it’s attempting to reach an agreement. After that, it feeds out the data, the match, or proposed times, and an LLM assists in crafting a message that makes sense when it returns, according to Paul.
Users of Skej can also group contacts into other categories so they can be linked to separate calendars, such as your personal or professional calendar. Paul thinks Skej will eventually be able to provide this kind of classification using natural language as well. For the time being, you can configure your preferences and integrations using a more conventional interface.
It’s amusing since VCs ask us this question all the time.”I mean, you’re going to have an app eventually, right?” asks Paul. However, he clarifies that the purpose of Skej is to be “totally agnostic to the tools that you already use and like and it can adapt to whatever workflow you’ve already got going on.”
He continues, “It’s not pressuring you into using a specific app or doing a specific thing.”
Betaworks, Mozilla Ventures, Stem AI, Spice Capital, Deftly.vc, and Differential Ventures are among the pre-seed investors in Skej. Paul states that the round was barely one million dollars. The two additional full-time engineers and the three co-founders of Skej make up its geographically dispersed staff.
Currently in public beta, more than 1,000 individuals are using the service. Skej is currently available for free while the team gathers feedback; a premium tier will be added later.