@ashley.striblet's reel — transcript & breakdown

The creator starts by addressing a recent conversation about why everyday people aren't using AI agents, setting up the problem to be solved.

“There was this recent conversation that blew up on X the other day asking why don't everyday people use agents the way that agents have really blown up in Silicon Valley.”

The creator, a former Google UX researcher, details three reasons why current AI agents don't appeal to everyday users, citing issues with use cases, user experience, and trust.

“So four reasons everyday people do not use agents. The first is the type of use cases that are really appealing to engineers and what people tend to use agents for around optimizing and reducing friction in workflows. This is not how everyday people think about their life and they're not always in this place where they're trying to optimize every single workflow in their like day to day life. Two, engineers tend to value capability over user experience whereas consumers tend to just want things to work. Apparently, if you build an agent in Claude, amazing things but you will often just hit different walls and different errors and you end up having to become your own tech support working with Claude to figure things out. It's not impossible, it's definitely doable but it does not appeal to the average consumer who's essentially been using Apple products they just work, they just intuitively make sense. Three, some of the most high value use cases for agentic and AI more broadly are things in more sensitive domains like health and finances. This ultimately requires someone giving a lot of personal data and trusting that that data will be kept secure and not basically used to take advantage of them and that means you ultimately have to have trust in the company you're giving that data to which a lot of companies just, the AI industry more broadly just does not have with a lot of consumers.”

The creator introduces 'Town' as an AI assistant that addresses the issues mentioned, highlighting its immediate value, delightful user experience with cartoon characters, and seamless integration into email.

“With that said I wanted to highlight one startup that I think is killing it and very likely to be a lot of people's first experience with agentic AI and that is the startup Town. They essentially have built something they're framing as an AI assistant that does the work for you. Um and for me what it really stands out compared to ChatGPT and Claude is like you can tell they really prioritize user experience and delight. I've said this in past videos, I particularly don't think uh Claude or ChatGPT are very well designed, no shade to the team. It is just very obvious that they are prioritizing the capability of those products and appealing to engineers and not everyday people and Town really stands out as a very specifically a consumer product. The idea is that Town operates as this a personal assistant that lives inside of your inbox and I think it does three things really really well. The first thing is that it immediately shows value. As soon as you give it access it essentially starts going to your inbox and making recommendations for the things it can do in your behalf. Compared to like an open chatbot where you have to kind of think about well what is the workflow that I want to do, what is the system I want to set up, it does all of that for you. Two it focuses a lot on delightful experiences. They specifically have these little cartoon characters that you can use and name them and I think it just kinda adds this fun and like delightful aspect of using AI that I think a lot of people are just like missing when you're just looking again at this empty chat box. Third it lives inside of your email inbox meaning that like it isn't something you necessarily have to go to or change your current behavior if you don't want to. You essentially can just like get a lot of value out of it by essentially looking at your like daily briefing and the things it's recommending for how you prepare for your day or the things it's recommending it will do in your behalf by just saying like yes please go do this thing.”

The creator endorses 'Town' as a product she uses and praises its potential to expose more people to the value of AI in an approachable way.

“And so for me it's totally become like a product that I use, this is not sponsored but also just like a startup that I'm now like paying a lot more attention to because the consumer space has just been kind of like kind of quiet over the last several months and so it's just really exciting to see something that I think will start to expose more people to what kind of the about potential value of AI could look like.”