Explore the insights of Jacob Bank, CEO of Relay.app, as he shares his journey from academic research in AI to founding a series of successful ventures.
Imagine a future where tedious tasks melt away, replaced by seamless automation powered by artificial intelligence. Enter Jacob Bank, CEO of Relay.app, a visionary leader who’s spent his career bridging the gap between academic research and practical productivity tools. His journey began at the Stanford AI Lab, where he delved into the fascinating world of human behavior and its impact on productivity. Armed with insights into procrastination, overconfidence, and time underestimation, he co-founded Timeful, an AI-powered calendar acquired by Google in 2015. His stint at Google saw him leading product development for Gmail, Calendar, and other critical tools, further honing his understanding of human-computer interaction.
Now, with Relay.app, Bank takes a bold step forward. His vision? “Meeting people where they work and automating the mundane.” But he’s not alone in this pursuit. In this interview, we’ll delve into the dynamic landscape of workflow automation, exploring how AI and human ingenuity can work together to unlock a new era of productivity.
Excerpts from the interview;Â
The future of workflow automation: How will AI reshape our work in the next 3-5 years?
While recent advances in AI open up a huge opportunity to automate more and more of our work, many workflows will still require human judgment. We aim to create a tool that can automate what computers do best while enabling people to do what they do best.
Balancing automation with human judgment: Can technology empower, rather than replace, human workers?
Since most of our team worked on Gmail and Google Calendar, we have a lot of experience securing critical data, following all of the industry best practices for encryption and data privacy, and being SOC2 compliant.
Relay.app’s competitive edge: What differentiates Relay.app from Asana, monday.com, and other players?
In our view of the workflow automation space, Zapier is the market leader, and Make.com is the strong number two. Our main differentiation concerning both products is the ability to add a human in the loop for approvals, decisions, and data input in an elegant way.
The intersection of automation and emerging technologies: Can low-code/no-code development and AI-powered process optimization unlock even greater potential?
AI is opening up a huge class of new use cases previously impossible for workflow automation tools that have historically relied on completely repeatable triggers and actions. With AI, we can automatically extract information, classify inputs, generate text, and more accurately tackle many new problems for our customers.
A peek under the hood: What’s the technical architecture behind Relay, and how does it ensure real-time collaboration and data security?
We’ve designed Relay to flexibly allow our users to combine automation with human judgment in the way that makes the most sense for their use case. For example, one use case may be completely fulfilled by AI (e.g., summarizing internal meeting notes and sharing them in Slack). In contrast, another use case may need human oversight (e.g., ensuring the right numbers were extracted from an invoice). Another may need significant manual involvement (e.g., completing a blog post initially drafted by AI). This fits into the spirit I mentioned earlier about letting computers take care of as much of the work as possible while empowering people to do what they do best.
The most important element of our architecture is the underlying abstractions that enable us to integrate with dozens of other products efficiently. For example, we have a carefully constructed concept of the data model of a project management system, which has made it easy to integrate reliably with Jira, Linear, Asana, ClickUp, Trello, etc.
A glimpse into the future: What exciting new features are on the horizon for Relay.app?
I’m most excited about continuing to refine our AI-powered and human-in-the-loop features so that we can help more users with more workflows.
