IrisGo, a startup backed by Andrew Ng, looks to become the AI desktop buddy you never knew you needed

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Industry insiders say the next big thing in AI is “proactive” systems: agents that can anticipate a user’s needs — and fulfill them — before the user even knows what those needs are.

One startup that’s looking to make headway in this area is IrisGo. The company, which closed a $2.8 million seed round led by Andrew Ng’s AI Fund earlier this year, is building a desktop companion for PCs that can learn about a user’s daily workflows and then automate them with limited to no human prompting.

Iris was co-founded by Jeffrey Lai, a former Apple engineer who helped to build the Chinese language version of Siri, the company’s automated assistant. (Somewhat slyly, Iris is Siri spelled backwards.)

The core idea is simple: show Iris how to do something once, and it remembers that process for future automated use — no repeat instructions needed.

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