A week in AI is like a year in other industries. I hope these issues become your weekly source of AI information, inspiration, and ideas. If we haven’t met before, I’m Amanda Smith. I write about AI and the fascinating folks who are building in this brave new world.
Good morning. When three ex-Meta AI award-winning researchers come together to build, you know it’s going to be something special.
If you’ve ever had to set aside time for digital “life admin”, you’re going to enjoy this read.
AI agents that actually work doing your digital drudgery while you sleep? Sign me up.
This week in AI:
No third-party chatbots in WhatsApp in Brazil
Ordered by Brazil’s competition watchdog.
Apple x Google deal to revamp Siri
A multi-year deal has been signed for Apple to use Gemini models to revamp Siri.
Bill Gates believes we should prepare ourselves this year.
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Company background: Yutori
Founded: 2024
Team size: 17
Funding to date: $15 million
ARR: Not disclosed
Growth metric: Approximately 30,000 people have signed up to try the product, with an 80% retention rate.
Abhishek Das, Yutori AI
Abhishek Das came to the U.S. in 2016 to pursue his PhD at Georgia Institute of Tech. His PhD explored problems at the intersection of computer vision, language, and reinforcement learning.
For example, what it would take to ask a home robot to find where you left your keys. Das co-authored an award-winning thesis that helped define how agents can see, talk, and act. This was in 2020, before the world knew what AI was.
Das went on to join Meta’s AI Research division, where he spent three years exploring the applications for AI in climate change. “One area that seemed exciting and under-invested in was material discovery – so using machine learning to accelerate the simulations needed for discovering new materials for renewable energy storage,” Das said.
He helped start an effort called the Open Catalyst project. The team grew to 20 and had launched into more domains, which inspired Das to move back to topics closer to his PhD research. Das reconnected with two prominent AI researchers he met during his time at Georgia Tech. They became his co-founders.
Their initial plan was to make space for tinkering to see what sticks. They landed on this concept of digital concierge.
“If we think about how people interact with the web, a large part of that is through the browser. Broadly speaking, we can bucket what we do in a web browser into two categories: Leisure or digital labor. Anything that falls into the latter bucket, the agentic capabilities are getting to a point where that interface can become much simpler, where we don’t need to manually click and navigate anymore,” he explained.
The idea
Enter Yutori, a company of AI agents that handle everyday digital tasks – an AI chief-of-staff for everyone. Their breakout product is Scouts, which monitors the web for any kind of task – finding local events, researching AirBnbs for a trip, news updates, property listings, price deals for a product etc.
Scouts accesses APIs but can also reach the corners of the web that an API may not be able to, with agents that are trained in-house – a capability Das said is particularly powerful.
“We wanted to be very clear in articulating the value proposition of Scouts, which is that these are agents that can monitor the web. They’re not going to buy, book or reserve things on your behalf. They simply monitor or track any information that you care about.”
The go-to-market strategy
They had the initial idea in January 2024 and had rolled out a beta version by June. The team put out a launch video on Twitter, and it went viral – which is how they built up a waitlist of 15,000.
They got a ton of feedback and made improvements to the underlying agent stack and product experience. “We started to see pretty good metrics such as a 30-day retention of 80%. While these were early adopters, so the numbers could be inflated, we felt it was a pretty healthy retention metric, so we announced pricing sooner than we initially anticipated.”
In December 2025, they had their General Availability (GA) launch.
Given how competitive the AI space is, Das said the company had to be venture-backed. “It’s not a lifestyle company.”
From free to paid model, in under a year
Their two main marketing channels are:
Twitter (company and founder-led)
Podcast, newsletter and press features
A lot of users come through word of mouth, from people trying out the product then telling their friends and colleagues.
“It’s hard to beat marketing that’s better than a friend telling you that they’ve tried out a product and that you should, too. As long as we can optimize that loop and continue doing a good job on that, we will continue to drive users,” Das shared.
The goal is to grow these surface areas and stay top-of-mind.
Looking ahead, Das said he thinks scouting (or this recurrent monitoring capability) is going to become more of a feature than the full product. “The full product will start to look more like an AI chief-of-staff that is always on and can make progress on a variety of tasks on your behalf, 24/7.
Takeaways
Watch your subconscious messaging. It’s never been easier to translate an idea into a feature or product. But if it’s different every time a user interacts with the product, it can be jarring.
It should feel like a premium product. Attention to detail in what users can see and touch builds trust in the bits that they can’t see.
Show, don’t tell. We share how we train our own models, what benchmarks we use, and as a result, got a lot of interest in customers trying out that API if we were to make it available.
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