- Carrol Chang, CEO of Andela, uses AI to manage her family's hectic schedules in New York City.
- An AI agent creates her kids' sports calendars and accounts for commuting times.
- Chang used to spend about five to eight hours a week on parenting admin. Now it's about two.
Carrol Chang is the CEO of Andela, which helps companies implement AI by connecting them with technical talent. The wife and mother of three, who lives in New York City, built AI agents using several models to help coordinate her family's schedules and manage school emails. The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.
That first year of my second child's life was joyous in so many ways, but it was also the hardest of my life. It almost broke me, and I have a wonderful husband.
I was privileged to be in a stable, senior job at a supportive workplace, and it didn't matter because the weight of the calendar management, the sick pickups, being the person that the school or the day care would call, trying to organize holiday gifts for the family, and booking family travel was crushing to me.
A lot of this mental load has been lifted, so I'm grateful. I now have three kids and agents for their sports and school, and for meal planning.
With their sports, the games are always on different days and in different boroughs. In the past, I would have had to look them up on Google Maps and map out the commute. Is it subway? Is it bus? Is it walking? Is it taking an Uber?
I'd put that commute time on the calendar with enough of a buffer to get there before the game. Then I'd do the same thing on the way home. If there's a conflict with the kids' schedules, you have to reconcile which parent is going to go to which game. Now the agent does it for me, and it saves me so much time.
The agent set up everything
I'm not an engineer, so I said to AI, "Talk to me like I'm a seventh grader and teach me step-by-step what I should do in order to accomplish this task." Then I had two open browsers, and I followed the instructions. Then, it magically runs.
The agent set up everything and sent me around 60 calendar invites for my kids' soccer games and back, and it was all expertly done. One says, "Uber to game, 23 minutes."
I think a lot of parents are finding the time in late nights and early mornings to do this kind of admin stuff, and that's not really what we want to do. What we want is to spend time with our families.
I remember calculating this, and it was about five to eight hours a week of mental labor. It was calendar management, meal planning, paying our nanny, messaging people to confirm what time to arrive for what, and ordering and unpacking groceries. Now, I probably spend two hours a week doing this stuff and checking on the agents.
If you go into this thinking that AI is not going to make a mistake, you will get so frustrated that you'll give up too early. People also make mistakes, so you just have to have a system of checking the AI.
It helps me stay on top of emails
I also created a school agent. I instructed the agent to read the school emails, pick out information, and add calendar events as needed. First and foremost, I need it to flag school closures and add them to the calendar.
I've instructed the agent to only care about events that apply to my kids. My kids go to a bilingual school, with a Spanish track and a Mandarin track. My kids are in the Spanish track, which means I want the agent to ignore the Mandarin events.
The agent will look at whether an email was sent to the listserv or whether it's from an individual. If it's an individual, it has to come through to me because the teacher is emailing my husband and me directly, so we should obviously pay attention.
An agent plans our dinners
My husband has also taken on a lot, and we now use an agent for meal planning. There are food allergies we have to take into account. I have a note in my phone with 15 dishes that would rotate every three weeks because we found our thing, and I didn't want to spend any more time thinking about this, so we're just going to do kale sausage pasta and eggplant moussaka.
Now, we don't have to do that because AI suggests new menus that meet everyone's requirements. Then it gives us instructions on what to shop for. These shopping apps have integrated AI, which makes it even easier.
With the extra time I have, I sleep more, and I get higher-quality sleep. I am less stressed and more pleasant to be around. The time I spend with my kids and family each day is more enjoyable for everyone.