Zlil Simchon runs Zazu. Before this she ran business operations at Blings, where she and Nir Portiansky, now Zazu's CTO, spent a few years wiring AI agents into how the company worked. We asked her how that turned into an AI family assistant, and why the mental load of a household still ends up in one person's head.
So how did this start?
With a phone call, actually. Nir and I were having lunch at the office. His wife called, and it was the usual: who's getting the kids, what's for dinner, something about the bank. I wasn't really listening. He hung up, was quiet for a second, and then he said, "I don't get it. We have a million agents helping us at work, and at home we're still on paper and pen."
I laughed, because it was true. But he wasn't joking. We talked about it the whole way back to the office.
What do you mean by agents at work? What were you two doing?
When the language models first came out we used them like everyone did. Write this email, summarize that. Small stuff. Then we got a bit obsessed. We started connecting things, mail to Slack, one tool to another, so information moved without someone copying it by hand. After a while the agents weren't only answering. They were noticing things and nudging people.
It took us a long time to get it right. Most of what we built at the start was annoying, honestly. Too many notifications, or it did things nobody asked for.
And you thought, let's do that for families?
Not right away. My first reaction was that home is simpler than work. I was wrong about that.
At work somebody owns every task. There's a deadline, a channel, a person whose job is to chase it. At home it's two people with full-time jobs and a kid, and operations is nobody's job. So it ends up in one person's head. In most of the families we talk to it's the mom. Not always.
Give me an example.
A birthday invitation. Your kid gets invited to a party on Saturday. That's one email. But then you have to RSVP before some date, put it in your calendar and your partner's, realize it clashes with soccer, figure out who drives who, buy a present, not spend too much on it, and tell the other parent about the peanut allergy.
We sat down once and wrote out every step and added up the time. It came to something like 47 minutes. For one email. And nobody sees any of it happen.
But there are apps for this. Shared calendars, lists.
Sure, and people use them. We hear Google Calendar a lot, and Skylight. They're fine. But a calendar only knows what you typed into it. Somebody still has to read the email, understand what it means for the week, and go do the five things. That somebody is the problem. Not the calendar.
So what does Zazu actually do?
It reads the email for you. If you let it. It connects to your mail and your calendar, it learns who's who in the family, and when something comes in it works out what needs to happen and asks you.
With the party it would write you something like: "Jake's party is Saturday at 2, that's during Olivia's practice. Want me to RSVP, tell them about the allergy, ask Mike to drive Olivia, and order something from the registry?" And you write back "yes." Or "yes but I'll get the gift."
It doesn't do anything important without asking. We're strict about that. People are trusting it with their family's inbox.
Why is it in WhatsApp and iMessage and not an app?
Because I don't want another app, and neither does anyone I know. You already text your partner forty times a day about this stuff. Zazu is just another contact in there. Both parents can talk to it, and you choose what's shared and what's only yours.
What's surprised you so far?
How fast people tell their friends. We invited about thirty families at the beginning, people we knew. Everyone who came after that, we didn't bring. Somebody's friend, somebody's sister.
If this works, what changes for a family?
The week stops living in one person's head. That's it. It's not a big vision. If Nir's wife doesn't have to make that call at lunch, we did our job.
See how Zazu works, or go back to the homepage to try it.