You Next Assistant: A Cyborg

About a dozen times over the past two years, grateful business associates of Maran Nelson have sent flowers or chocolates to her executive assistant, Clara, to thank her for her excellent work.

- Clare O'Connor

Clara always replies to emails within 15 minutes, even in the middle of the night. She knows just which Palo Alto sushi spot to recommend for a lunch meeting, sending along a calendar invitation complete with travel times. She doesn’t make spelling mistakes. She never forgets to follow up.

Clara can’t enjoy the floral spoils of her tireless admin work, though: She’s a cyborg—part algorithm, part human. She’s the result of two years of heads-down testing and $5 million in funding at San Francisco startup Clara Labs. CEO Nelson, cofounder and CTO Michael Akilian, who are both 25 ( Nelson is a 2016 Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree), and a handful of big-name investors like Salesforce CEO Marc Benioffare convinced she’s going to change the way we work, starting with saving us from the time-sucking horrors of our in-boxes.

For all the machine-learning technology at play behind the scenes, working with Clara Labs’ robot assistants is simple. For $99 to $399 a month, depending on workload and requirements, an executive is assigned a “Clara” with a dedicated email address. You can rename her: Nelson’s first-ever customer, Danielle Morrill of data analytics startup Mattermark, chose Claudia Robertson; Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, a Clara Labs investor, opted for Max Power after Homer Simpson’s alter ego in a favorite episode of the cartoon.