The voice in your ear (Bloomberg, 1/17/2025)

A few weeks ago, I was procrastinating — a habit that I’ve been
perfecting since grade school. I needed to send an email that I had,
for various reasons, been avoiding. So for a kick in the rear, I
picked up my phone and called an artificial intelligence-powered drill
sergeant.

“Sending that email is your mission,” he barked at me. “Failure is not
an option.”

When I meekly told him that I wasn’t sure I could get it done today,
he — it? — was not amused.

“Listen up, maggot! There is no tomorrow in this platoon.” The AI
voice told me to respond and say exactly what time I would commit to
sending the email.

I knew the drill sergeant wasn’t a real person. But it was an uncanny
experience — and surprisingly motivating — to hear a voice, in real
time, swatting away my excuses and telling me to get my act
together. (I committed to a time and sent the email.)

As many of us are reminded each January, it’s easy to come up with
goals: sleep better, exercise more and avoid distraction. But we
struggle to actually follow through, especially when we only rely on
our own willpower for accountability.

Outsourcing that accountability can help. Over the years, I’ve tried
various ways of doing that: software that blocks distracting apps for
a few hours, or Zoom sessions with a stranger in which you discuss
your goals then work on them in parallel for an hour.

For many people, the most effective accountability system is when
someone else in their life also cares about the goal getting
done. (That’s probably why some people hit work deadlines for their
boss, but they postpone going to the gym — unless they have a trainer
waiting for them.)

You could pay for an accountability coach, but it’s pricey. You could
ask a friend to enforce your deadlines, but that can get strained or
they might get busy and forget.

AI-powered bots have their drawbacks: They struggle to get details
right, and they can’t always execute tasks. But they’re always
available, which means they have an infinite ability to pester you
about getting things done.

“People tell me, ‘I want someone to kick my ass,’” said Alex Roe,
chief executive officer of Summit, the app which built my AI drill
sergeant. Summit, which was founded in 2023, offers AI coaches in a
variety of personalities, from peppy to philosophical, but Roe said
the drill sergeant is the most popular. “People need and want
something to hold them accountable,” he said. “They don’t want, ‘It’s
OK, next time.’”

Summit is part of a growing crop of startups hoping to package
underlying large language model technology from OpenAI and Anthropic
into ever-available coaches that can help us achieve our goals. Voice
technology, like what Summit uses, can make these interactions feel
increasingly real. It’s easier than ever now to build a bot that can
speak fluidly like a human on the other end of the line.

Of course, if I ignore the drill sergeant and close the app, he can’t
do anything about it. Summit offers a “turbo mode” where if you don’t
show evidence of meeting your goal by a certain time, it’ll text an
alert to a friend of your choice — very mild social shaming. But by
and large, this is not a service focused on real-world
consequences. Roe said they designed Summit to help you commit to
goals and, more importantly, connect to the “why” behind each goal.

“We’re more focused on that pseudo-human connection,” Roe said. If you
believe your robot taskmaster is kind of human, then you might feel
kind of guilty if you let it down. Maybe.