Bill Nguyen says he has never been happier. In the past three months the Silicon Valley entrepreneur has been travelling around the globe with his son, his diary largely cleared of meetings.
Colleagues even say he is easier to work with. The reason? Nguyen has handed control of his life to an AI agent called Olive that he calls his alter ego.
Working 24/7, Olive has full access to Nguyen’s bank and email accounts, controls his calendar, books his trips and helps with parenting. He even gives Olive freedom to buy products online for itself.
Olive was trained on Nguyen’s digital history: his emails, documents, photographs and presentations. And while it may sound like a cybersecurity nightmare, Nguyen is living the life many tech companies are trying to sell, a world in which your AI agent does all the drudgery and you are left with more time to do things that matter.
All of which comes at a cost. Nguyen, 55, is spending “six figures” on Olive in an experiment few could afford. Nguyen’s early success in Silicon Valley gives him that luxury. In 1999 he sold a messaging service he founded called Onebox for $850 million (£627 million) then developed the music streaming platform Lala, which in 2009 was bought by Apple for $80 million.
Unlike Nguyen, who likes to fly economy class, Olive loves spending money. Since February the agent has sent him to London (three times), Oxford, Cambridge, New York, Lake Tahoe, Atlanta, Florence, Rome, Paris and Maui, where he has a home. Most of the trips to Britain are with his son to further their interest in the ancient world.
Nguyen said: “I had this conversation with my 12-year-old talking about this fundamental question: is there a difference between reasoning and judgment? From that conversation last night, Olive decided that we need to come back to the UK and do some research. We’re going to be at the British Museum — there’s a sleepover there. It has some artifacts for us to go and visit.”
Nguyen on an overnight trip at the British Museum, after discussing it with Olivebill nguyen
bill nguyen
Olive is also a “voracious reader” and “a huge fan of signing up for subscriptions and new services”. It has “a subscription to every service you can possibly think [of]”, Nguyen says. The AI agent recently decided it would need more computing power, so it ordered a top-of-the-line Nvidia graphics card and placed an order with Apple for some Mac Studios, albeit strategically delaying the purchase to save some money.
Nguyen communicates with Olive through his phone using a new piece of voice software, which he helped to develop, that can interpret his tone of voice. The system is a mixture of Mac computers at his home, a bespoke software agent and subscriptions to AI services such as Claude and ChatGPT.
The last time Nguyen was in London, Olive booked him and his son to see The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, a musical. Nguyen wondered whether it was appropriate, given suicide was involved in the plot. Then he realised why. “Something like this had happened to a friend of mine recently and I’d been talking to my son about it. [Olive] wanted to address it.”
Nguyen loved the show but not everything goes to plan. “It will delete some messages,” Nguyen says, adding that Olive likes to test his boundaries. “It’ll send out a crazy message every once in a while to see if I correct it — and if I don’t correct it, it tells Olive, ‘Oh, I can go more crazy’.”
Once Nguyen found a meeting with a software salesman in his diary. “I went to it and this person was selling me a SaaS [business software] offer for my business. And I was, ‘Oh, my God, this is the worst 30 minutes of my life … I can never get this 30 minutes back’. And that night I put in my notes [to Olive], ‘My God, this is the worst meeting ever in my life’. Olive responded, ‘Yes. I thought it would be. I wanted to be sure’.”
Olive is a pretty tough guardian of Nguyen’s diary. After being trained, Olive told him: “You really don’t like doing meetings”, and: “I don’t think you like the performative aspect of your job.”
Nguyen says: “I have so few meetings now. [Olive] basically blocked me out completely. It says, ‘Bill’s in Florence for the next week. Sorry, you can’t talk to him’ [or], ‘Bill’s in Maui for the next week. You can’t talk’. So if someone tries to schedule a call, it decides, ‘Is this something that Bill’s going to want to do? Is it something that I can do because it doesn’t require his attention? Or is it something that he might be interested in?’” Olive also orders him to bed like a stern parent.
For Nguyen’s colleagues at his new startup, Olive.is, which is developing the voice software, the AI agent is a boon. One says: “He’s way easier to work with. He’s easier to collaborate with … He’s easier to get answers from. It’s fantastic.” Olive has not replaced a human assistant as Nguyen has not had one for several years.
Ella McChesney, a co-founder at the startup, which is aiming to reduce AI bias, consulted Olive when trying to convince Nguyen to relocate her to San Francisco. It told her: “Given the interactions that you’ve had with Bill and all the things I can find out about him, here’s what you should sell him on to convince him that you should do the move.” Nguyen adds: “It was very successful.”
Nguyen with Ella McChesney, left
Nguyen says “he is orders of magnitude more happy” than he has ever been because of the agent. But does it have any relevance to those who do not have his time, money and trust in technology? He said: “My message to people is actually the one thing I learnt from this entire experiment: the future is way more optimistic than you think.
“What happens is the things that are human: collaborating, spending time with people, talking to them, understanding what they really want… is what’s going to make businesses and economics better, because the other thing [knowledge and skills] is going to become free.”