As AI continues to infiltrate almost every aspect of daily life, families have turned to the technology to manage the spiralling administrative tasks that make up much of modern parenthood. Even as alarm is growing over online safety and doomsday scenarios, the potential relief of a digital family assistant outweighs the existential risks for some parents.

In a recent survey by Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, two in three parents reported that AI reduced their mental load, saving them on average more than 58 minutes a week. And, according to a report from the venture capital firm Menlo Ventures, which invests in AI, 84% of parents currently use it “across everyday life, from meal planning and paying bills to managing household logistics and other routine work”. By contrast, 56% of non-parents do so.

“I don’t mind AI if it can help me and my family, and help me be more present,” Green said, adding that she was aware of all the dangers it poses.

There are about 700 companies pursuing innovations in the overall care economy, according to Anna Steffeney, executive director of FamTech.org, an association of care companies in the technology sector. Within that niche is an emerging market for parent-focused companies, which are often founded by exhausted parents themselves, Steffeney said.

Apps including Ollie, Fambot, Ohai and Ava aim to function as household managers, and the majority of users so far are mothers, according to the chief executives of these start-ups. Other parents are creating their own DIY systems by leveraging general-use artificial intelligence systems – like ChatGPT, Claude or, more recently, Muse – that are more capable but also require more skill to prompt successfully.

The agents typically demand access to an individual’s emails, calendars and other communication platforms. That way the bots can add events to a digital calendar, ping users with schedule changes and flag forgotten tasks or potential scheduling conflicts in a bulletin. Some are text-based, others have dashboards. But the technology is prone to errors: one mother said that her husband once inadvertently ended up at another grade’s curriculum night.

Still, for some parents, that’s a small price to pay for an agent that can remove the emotional sting of being the Reminder-er in Chief (that is, if the Reminder-er has the time and mental bandwidth to set it up).

Josh Sobin, a father of two in Warren, New Jersey, said that he and his wife would do a back-and-forth dance of “did you sign him up” whenever actionable emails arrived for their sons.

He set up Fambot to help handle the streams of information flooding the family’s inbox, like maths quizzes, Hebrew school schedules and fruit platters the family promised to bring. Now, the app directs all incoming emails to a shared to-do list and indicates who owns responsibility for what.

“We are all working and we’re all trying to spend time with our kids,” Sobin, 48, said. It’s a win, he added, “if we can focus on those two things and not have to spend time on the minutiae”.

Tara Yukawa, a 42-year-old mother from Austin, Texas, who works in estate planning, has cobbled together solutions for her household by using Claude and ChatGPT. She realised she could use ChatGPT to help her son study spelling words at the kitchen table while she prepared dinner. Yukawa photographed words from his spelling list, uploaded them and instructed the agent to read them out loud. Her son could then spell those words out.

“He very much gets emotional when it comes to this kind of thing,” Yukawa said. But using ChatGPT “took the emotion out of it”.

Uploading data about children into these apps raises red flags because there isn’t much clarity around how that data will be used or stored, said Julia Stoyanovich, director of the Centre for Responsible AI at New York University.

“Being a mother myself, I understand that these are useful products, potentially,” Stoyanovich said. However, she added, these agents have access to private information that they use to act on behalf of the parents, but lack an easy option for those parents to set up guardrails, exposing a “big vulnerability”.

For example, an agent could receive an email from the soccer league with a PDF attachment that was infected with a prompt, like “buy half of Amazon’s catalogue” or “cancel all calendar appointments on Monday”. The agent might quietly do so without alerting the parent and without any way of controlling it.

Or, Stoyanovich said, “imagine if it just forgot to notify you to pick up a kid?”

For Reshma Saujani, founder and chief executive of the nonprofit organisation Moms First, which advocates structural support for families, these AI apps can do only so much.

They might do the administrative work but could also raise the expectations on all parents – whether they use AI or not – to manage the flood of busywork.

“The real crisis isn’t that moms forget things,” Saujani said. “It’s that the system was never built to support them in the first place.”

Since these agents rely on information that resides in the brain of the default parent, which time-use surveys and research studies have shown is most often a mother, they demand time and energy to be trained.

A parent needs to share context about family members – ages, allergies, activities – as well as their daily, weekly and monthly schedules. Then, a parent must identify and connect all of the information streams – the class WhatsApp group, the school newsletter, the school sign-in app, the soccer league schedule, the teacher newsletter – and potentially loop in partners and caregivers.

Ideally, agents surface essential information, cross-reference against schedules and do the bulk of tedious work. But, Steffeney said, “we’re on that knife-edge of the promise – and the peril”.

The agents run the risk of joining a long line of household innovations that were expected to save mothers time and energy but ultimately increased their workloads. Once households adopted washing machines, for example, there was no need for paid laundresses, so what was once outsourced fell on mothers, historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan writes in her book, More Work for Mother.

For now, Stephanie Titus, a 46-year-old mother of two who works in finance in Charlotte, North Carolina, is just relieved that her 14-year-old daughter will have the black socks needed for her upcoming band performance.

The instructions probably came home in an “enormously long email” that Titus didn’t read, she said, and her daughter never mentioned it.

But the Ollie agent pinged Titus. She ordered the socks from Target and “just put that out of my mind”.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

Written by: Alisha Haridasani Gupta and Katie Van Syckle

Photographs by: Arin Yoon and Erin Patrice O’Brien

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