IrisGo, co-founded by Andrew Ng, looks to be the AI ​​computer friend you never knew you needed

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

One of the startups looking to make headway in this area is IrisGo. The company, which closed $2.8 million in crop rotation led by Andrew Ng’s AI Fund earlier this year, it is developing a desktop companion for PCs that can learn about a user’s daily movements and change them automatically without human intervention.

Iris was founded by Jeffrey Lai, a former Apple engineer who helped develop the Chinese version of Siri, the company’s personal assistant. (For a trick, Iris and Siri are spelled backwards.)

The basic idea is simple: show Iris how to do something once, and it remembers the method for future use – no repeat instructions needed.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Lai ran a demo, showing how Iris can learn to order coffee online. I see, Iris recorded what it took to order a latte from Philz Coffee (a popular Bay Area chain), enter credit card information, and then make a purchase. Lai then asked Iris to repeat the plan herself; the agent obeyed.

Buying coffee, of course, is not really. Instead, the hope is that the system will automate many of the business-related tasks. Iris comes with a library of built-in “skills” – things like writing emails, preparing invoices, creating reports, summarizing documents, and more for automated use. At the same time, Iris learns from the user’s computer behavior and automatically adds those tasks to its to-do list.

The software also includes a documentation assistant – similar to OpenAI’s Codex or Anthropic’s Claude Code – designed to support developers in their work.

“Our target audience is knowledge workers – white-collar companies. There are a lot of repetitive tasks that those workers do every day,” said Lai, noting that, despite the high-octane power of today’s cutting-edge models, AI-assisted office work can still feel overwhelming and repetitive. The goal, he said, is to move away from that to autonomous systems, where humans do the high-level thinking while agent systems take care of all the clerical work in the background.

The most interesting thing about Iris is that it is designed to be able to process information on devices, and give them power privacy protection than other applications that rely heavily on the cloud. Lai says the system is still a hybrid architecture — meaning that larger, more complex tasks are ultimately processed through the cloud, even for the company. they promise that cloud processing “occurs only with the consent of the user and the use of end-to-end encryption.”

One of the ways to reduce the iris has been to gain credibility by connecting with celebrities and organizations. Support from Ng – especially the co-founder of the course research group Google Brain – it has helped. Lai was able to set up a meeting with Ng through a shared connection: both are alumni from Carnegie Mellon University. Lai and a co-founder pitched Iris at the conference, and Ng’s AI Fund eventually led the initial seed round. Nvidia and Google have also backed the company.

IrisGo recently launched beta versions of its software for macOS and Windows, and the company is also partnering with laptop companies to install the software on new devices. Recently he did something and Acer, and Lai said the hope is that the company can do the same with other hardware manufacturers in the near future.