Why Does Jean-Denis Greze Begin With Email and Calendar?

Jean-Denis Greze agrees with the iPhone framing. Agents get more effective when they have secure, privacy-preserving access to the data and the APIs that run a business. Without that access, they are only as smart as the data they can see.

Assistance is used by a few million people worldwide, and Greze says the category is still early enough that not every CEO has tried it. He says it will probably take 6, 12, or 18 months, just like the iPhone, before most people feel the magic in personal life. The way into a company is to get a few people there by connecting email and calendar, not the core systems of record. For external-facing roles, calendar and email show how to automate part of someone's work, and the assistant can then help prepare them for meetings.

Greze does not want to be Good Technologies. Good was an enterprise-ready email client for the iPhone, and he says that kind of tool is not a good business when it misses the quality of every other iPhone app. The risk is being BlackBerry, or being Good, while people use the Gmail app because it offers both convenience and the enterprise features a business cares about.