Right now, there’s a founder building a multi-agent-orchestration platform to oversee the most complex workflow of them all: your child.
I’m only being slightly silly. AI scheduling tools are hitting the market to help parents keep track of the hundreds of kid-related logistical things they need to remember every month. I’m aware of at least three new ventures: Molo, Hermo and Poppy, which sound like a trio of privately-schooled kids.
I’ve been using Hermo — named after Hermes, the messenger of the gods in Greek mythology — developed by Jenna Blaicher-Brown and her husband Fabian, and it’s making me look a little better at home.
Hermo scans my inbox and pulls out the key details buried in the inexhaustible gusher of emails we get from the crèche my 21-month-old daughter attends. Crucially, it sends these highlights via WhatsApp — which suits me perfectly, since I’m crummy at email and live on WhatsApp.
Last week, for example, it reminded me to dress my daughter up for a themed day at the crèche (La Fête d'Élégance, which sounds exactly as French as it is, because we live in Paris).
It was a small thing, but considering my day-to-day admin struggles, being the one to tip off my wife on this felt, well, huge.
There's more you can do too: leave a voice note with your tasks for the week and the tool will remind you as needed.
Admittedly, it’s also misbehaving a little, reminding me to update my subscription to a TV streaming service, which has no connection to parenting (the tool is still being tested in “beta” mode, so I will definitely heed the founders’ plea to cut them some slack).
Blaicher-Brown acknowledges Hermo is fairly "reactive" for now; the plan is for the AI to become “proactive” later, taking on complex tasks. Forgot to buy a present for your kid's friend's birthday? Or need help coming up with meal plans? Don't worry — the AI agent will eventually do it for you.
Scheduling rivals
Sophie Bruce, the founder of Molo — which does similar things to Hermo — created her AI tool because her brain was being “fully hijacked by the modern load: the relentless cognitive weight of running a family,” she says.
“I drove home from an all-day board meeting and realised I wasn't thinking about strategy or revenue. I was calculating ‘nappy burn rate’ for an upcoming holiday.”
Parents are facing a “digital bombardment” from schools across different apps and WhatsApp groups, she adds. “We're the first generation of parents dealing with all of this. The infrastructure has not kept up.”
Others, like Michael Stothard, a partner at VC firm Firstminute Capital — and a former editor at Sifted — are “vibe coding” their own AI schedulers.
Stothard has three kids, all in different schools, meaning many bits of correspondence to keep track of. “If there’s a note buried in an email on Wednesday saying I need to pick up my kid at the sports ground on Friday, I mean that’s pretty important information,” he says.
Grind culture returns
Parents working in tech could certainly do with a digital dig-out, as pressure grows on startups to move fast and figure out AI before the competition.
For some, this has meant pulling more hours at the office. “Grind culture has returned to startups in a big way, which is especially tough for parents,” says Sarita Runeberg, CEO of Helinski-based tech hub Maria 01.
She recently surveyed techies in nine countries and found that some have limited the number of children they planned to have due to the demands of building a company. “Across Europe, birth rates are at historic lows just as we urgently need more founders to drive the next wave of growth,” Runeberg says. “We cannot afford to choose between the two.”
One of the people polled was Teemu Myllymäki, founder of Helsinki-based Measurlabs, which helps companies do lab testing. Both Myllymäki and his wife have demanding jobs, so when their child is sick, “there’s real competition over who stays home to look after him,” he tells me.
“It’s difficult to be a part of this extreme hustle culture and be a Dad,” Myllymäki says. His workaround: do 40-50 hours per week at the office, spend evenings with his son, then take his laptop out again after his son goes to bed.
Myllymäki uses AI not for scheduling, but as a diagnosis-giver when his child has a rash or is feeling unwell. But it’s still better to turn to grandparents for this job, he adds: “They were the AI before AI”.
‘I made a digital clone of my kid’
Aside from playing chief of staff and doctor, I heard of other ways parents are using AI to help with parenting.
Few are doing as much experimenting as Igor Shaverskyi. The founder of UK-based tech advisory firm Waveup has three kids and uses all manner of AI tools.
“I built a digital twin of my five-year-old’s voice using ElevenLabs,” he tells me, nodding to the startup that creates uncanny artificial voices. “Now he gets to hear how ‘virtual Timi’ reads difficult parts of books.”
ChatGPT corrects his kids on their spelling and “whenever we're traveling, I’ll send random photos to the chatbot and ask to spice them up, like rendering a pirate ship or a massive ice cream mountain behind my daughter,” he adds.
Shaverskyi says his wife, meanwhile, has built an app with ChatGPT rival Claude that maps out kid-friendly spots around London. And if all this weren’t enough, Shaverskyi also uses OpenClaw — the AI tool built by Austrian founder Peter Steinberger, which OpenAI bought earlier this year — to transcribe his wife’s parenting-related voice notes into tasks. “There's no other way I'd process or remember half of it otherwise,” he says.
Other parents tell me they’re using AI for teaching, such as UK-born techie Andrew Smith, whose family are digital nomads currently living in Greece. He’s built tools with Claude to home school his three and five year olds.
Seena Rejal, chief commercial officer at AI infrastructure startup NetMind.AI, also uses OpenClaw to suggest family activities, “like carving out time for bedtime reading of Persian poetry and literature,” he says. “It’s part of my Iranian heritage and something I want to pass on, especially now that AI risks flattening so much of what makes us who we are.
“It’s strange because I’m using AI to make time for the things AI can never touch,” he adds.
Can AI be trusted?
But should we trust any of these tools? After all, this is AI: a known BS-er.
There’s potential here for mishap. My colleague uses a few AI scheduling tools and it was ChatGPT that put a wrong date in a calendar, causing them to miss their kid’s music recital.
This was after OpenAI boss Sam Altman gushed to chat show host Jimmy Fallon about how helpful ChatGPT has been in helping him raise his son. “I cannot imagine having gone through figuring out how to raise a newborn without ChatGPT,” Altman said.
But parents should beware “general AI assistants”, says Molo’s Bruce. “They are terrible at running your family, because they don't know your family. They don't know which child goes to which school, that Tuesday is the one day you cannot do pickup, or that the class assembly email buried in a PDF actually applies to you.”
Blaicher-Brown adds her thoughts: “You don't want to miss stuff, but the baseline shouldn't be perfection,” she says.
Of course, an AI agent — or even a sophisticated swarm of the buggers — can never be a substitute for a parent.
But an agent could be given a budget to buy stuff for kids, Stothard argues. “AI can, for sure, buy a present for a seven year old. They’re not like your partner or best friend, they’re pretty easy to shop for.”
‘We need something beyond AI’
Of the three AI scheduling apps I reviewed, Poppy is the furthest along. Founder Alex Fenton, who I also contacted for this article, is charging a modest subscription fee: £1 a week.
On his website — in reassuringly large font — are the words: “You're not a bad parent. You’re just dealing with an inbox that was never designed for family life”.
Having surveyed founders about their parenting struggles, Runeberg concludes that something beyond AI would be the real gamechanger. She’s calling for a new kind of daycare.
“Daycare was the reason women could join the workforce in the first place,” she says. “But now we need daycare 2.0, by which I mean somewhere flexible where busy parents can leave their child for a few hours at a time, or at unusual hours, like from 5-9PM.”
A creche in small installments, hmm, what can we call this? Buy now, parent later? I’ll let the founders figure out the finer details.
