Can AI help with the chaos of family life? | Avni Patel Thompson (Kelly Corrigan takeover)

0:06You are listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day. I'm Kelly Corrigan. I'm a writer. I'm a podcaster. I'm a TED Talker. And I am taking over for Elise Hu this week for a special series on AI and family life. I guest curated a session about this topic at TED 2025. And I'm here now to share these very special talks with you along with a lot of behind the scenes recordings and personal insights to shed some light on the process of how these talks came to life.

0:49So last year, after I gave my TED Talk, I was invited to this women's dinner, and there were probably 25, 30 women there. And they all had incredible jobs. Many of them had spoken before on stage. Many of them had written books. Many of them run their own companies. And Avni Patel Thompson was one of those women. She had started to develop a product that parents would use to manage the onslaught of logistics involved in family life, such that the parents could be more engaged when it counted. And I knew that if we were going to pull this session off, we were going to need somebody who was actually designing AI that parents would use to manage their families.

1:28So I followed up with Avni and I said, what are you working on again? and she said, oh, we were just trying to lighten the load for parents using AI. And I was like, hmm, what'd you just say? I think we better jump on the phone and have a conversation. And so we did. It's interesting when you ask somebody like Avni to talk about AI and where it should and should not enter the parent-child relationship. I didn't want to set her up to be the villain. I did need her to be super direct about exactly what areas of family life her product was considering getting involved in. And that yielded a really interesting takeaway that you'll hear in the talk about a conversation she had with a board member who was starting to see these fascinating and potentially profitable product extensions that made OVNI start to wonder what the consequences of that kind of product development might be.

2:21And that brought up this really interesting question, which is, is there something lost when you are not in the weeds with your kids and their lives? Is there a way in which reducing all this noise around logistics threatens some of those tiny time-sensitive interactions that you can occasionally have with your kid when you're driving them to baseball? If you remove every possible hiccup from family life using AI, does that somehow, weirdly, reduce the number and variety of situations you might find yourself in that are quote-unquote teachable moments? So I was desperate to get Avni to write a TED Talk.

3:01Now, when she sat down to do it, she had about 4 ,000 ideas that she was trying to cram into nine minutes. So the process of working with her was to try to narrow her field of vision on this thing and ask her if you could only say one thing. If people listen to your talk and then they walk down in the hall and their friend said, oh, I missed that one. What was it about? What would they say? What do you want them to say? And that's really hard. And I totally empathize with it as someone who tried to do it the year before. there's this terrible inclination to try to boil the ocean. And it's very painful to let go of the opportunity to say three things or four things, but it's unwise to bite off that much.

3:41And so the process with Avni was to continually refine. What do you know that no one else knows about designing AI for family life? Scientist and serial entrepreneur Avni Patel Thompson has created three startups to support family life, including her most recent effort, which has much to teach us about the future of our most intimate and consequential relationships. And finally, with like no time to spare, she came up with a really brilliant point that is specific and memorable, and you'll hear it now in Avni Patel Thompson's TED Talk.

4:23Go get it, baby. Hi, everyone. So it's a Tuesday afternoon, and I'm in my home office working on a tricky product design. I have my headphones on, and I'm in my groove. Just then, one of those annoying dings cuts through my do not disturb. So it's somewhat important. It's Rosa, our nanny. Hey, Avni, I was wondering if I could take next Friday morning off. I silenced it. I'll just get back to her a little bit later. I realized I need something from my email, so I head mindlessly to my inbox. Big mistake. There are not one, but six basketball emails, rehearsal, and a field trip. That's okay. I've got remarkable self-restraint, and I leave them unread.

5:09I also activate my really foolproof system of telling myself not to forget. I grab my email, and I get back to work. Two more minutes. Another ding. It's Rosa again. Hey, Avni, I'm at this school for pickup, but there's no one here. Should I be somewhere else? Immediately, monkey brain activates. I grab my phone. What day is it? What time is it? Today's play rehearsal, right? That should be at the big gym. I head back to my email, looking through all of the rehearsal emails, costumes, volunteering, and there on the schedule for today at the bottom, oh, by the way, today's in the music room. I text Rosa and tell her to head to the other side of the school, and I sit back relieved, and my eyes fall on those unread emails.

5:55And I think you know what happens next. I finished that product doc, obviously. Yeah, no. I'd like to tell you that this is the exception, but I ended up creating an AI company because it wasn't. Because with two kids, two jobs, and your modern family cocktail of crazy hair days and soccer tournaments and misplaced library books, I loved how full our life was, but I hated that somehow my brain had become the computer that ran my family. And worse, it made collaboration nearly impossible because everything was in my head and the only way to get it out of there was to ask me. At which point, I would look to my husband and say, when was it that I became his project manager?

6:41Pro tip, not a very good way to handle human relationships. But maybe it's because I've been a scientist and a product designer before I became a tech founder that next to that frustration, I also felt curiosity and opportunity. I had honed my ability to find the tiniest bits of friction in everyday interactions and to build products that solve them, like packaging for an osteoporosis drug that was both child-resistant and accessible to arthritic hands. Or designing a service for parents to connect to sitters and doing it over SMS because that's where they already are, instead of sending them to another app.

7:23And this? Parenthood? Well, this felt like the Friction Olympics. I wanted to build myself a force field, a machine that could intercept every interruption, an expert that was more capable and organized than I could ever be. I mean, if we were going to use my brain as the computer to run it all, why couldn't we use an actual computer instead? My first few tries failed. It didn't matter how meticulously I entered every last detail of our family's logistics. There was always some situation or scenario I would fail to detail. I mean, try explaining a five-year-old's sudden allergy to square-shaped foods, to software.

8:09But then three years ago, things changed. Large language models started to get really good. And unlike software, AI could handle ambiguous and incomplete information. It could take something like a birthday party invite and not just do the explicit thing, like get it into my calendar, but handle the implicit things that too often mess tired, busy parents up, like reminding me to buy a birthday present or checking for conflicts. So now, when my husband and I are hit with something related to the family, I've built Milo, the first AI sidekick for parents, to be able to take those school newsletters and grocery items and library books and be able to handle it.

8:53And best yet, Milo can tell everyone what's happening every day. Finally, a computer that can actually run things. So you'd think that this is where the story ends. But no, because I'm human and I'm greedy. If Milo could take on the rote, repetitive, administrative parts of family life so beautifully, why not keep on going? Why couldn't it coordinate playdates with Sienna's mom, Carrie? Or when the girls were bickering, pop in to suggest the ideal way to resolve their dispute. So a couple of months ago, we're working on ways to improve this force field, and one of my investors, a guy who's pretty reserved unless you get him fired up, goes, well, Milo can see those evening events and just automatically text your sitter.

9:43Or it knows your friend's birthdays and it can just send them birthday wishes. And those teacher emails? Well, Milo can just connect directly to your inbox and suck every last one up so you never have to see another one again. As we fleshed these features out, though, something just didn't feel right. But I couldn't figure out what it was. After all, I was looking for friction and finding ways to eliminate it. But something just didn't feel right. What was it? That question nagged me for weeks. Until one evening, my daughter Saya ran into the kitchen to show me something she had made in art class.

10:23And as I ran my fingers over those tiny clay pieces, it hit me. Not all friction is bad. You might know, to connect two of these clay pieces together, you actually have to score each side haphazardly so that they have something to grip onto. Otherwise, the smooth sides just slide past one another. This resistance is called productive friction, and it's valuable because it creates connection. And where people are involved, there's lots of productive friction, meaningful interactions disguised as inefficiencies. I didn't need a perfectly solid force field. I needed a permeable one instead, one that shielded me from the things that I found unproductive, but let in the fewer, messier, more meaningful ones for me to handle.

11:16Milo could find three times that worked for the play date, but I could text Carrie, which would give me a chance to ask her about her mother. Or Milo could comb through every last detail of that school newsletter, picking out details that my eyes might miss, but leave for me on top Miss V's note about how our daughter Aria's creative writing has really been blossoming. You might draw your line in a different place, and that's okay, and I might draw mine differently under different circumstances, In a week when my husband is traveling and our nanny is sick, the girls have tennis tryouts and I have a product launch, I want Milo to build me a force field you could see from space.

11:58But I guess the point is, we finally have the kind of technology that can tell the difference between load that we need help lightening and work that is hard, but that is mine to do. I've begun to realize that one of the most radical things AI can do for us is not do the things for us faster and better, but to push us to choose what is most meaningful and then make the space for us to do it ourselves. This feels like a brave new world, but I'm excited to see what is possible when we have tools that encourage us not to be more perfect and productive, but unfinished and evolving. That reminds us not to be afraid, to bear the friction.

12:46It just shows us how we are all beautifully, imperfectly, inconveniently human. Thank you.

12:59That was Avni Patel-Thompson from the TED stage. Don't go away. We'll be right back for more of a deep dive on Avni's work and what did and did not make it into her TED Talk and why, right after a short break.

13:15So the idea that Avni put to the audience that I think is really interesting is how much will we, as the consumer of these AI products designed for family life, be able to tune them to our values, which hopefully will be the impetus for talking explicitly about what your values actually are and how they might be evolving over time. Like it's not a bad thing for parents to talk to each other about how do we want to communicate about grades? Like every single school now has a way for parents to track homework assignments and quizzes and tests and essays. And, you know, it's a choice that parents should make in the context of their values.

13:50Like are we going to keep our eyes glued to every little thing that happens in the lives of our kids? Are we going to use something like Life360 to track their every step? Do we believe our kids should work part-time and starting at what age? All of those values are worth talking about. So if there's a product that you've let into your home to help you, say, reduce friction that is actually somehow forcing that conversation, you know, are we living our values or do they kind of live over here on some shelf and we don't really apply them and they're not really showing up in our schedule or our budget, which is where the rubber really hits the road, that could be a very good thing.

14:24And that's what Avni is asking us to consider. And it's also what she's asking tech designers and developers to consider. Specifically, how accommodating is your product to the values of the families that will be using it? And should it be customizable to each family, for better or for worse? Like you can talk about like, you know, human reinforcement learning, right? Like reinforce these behaviors and stuff like that. But the base comes from somewhere. The base has been trained on something. And so for us, what we're doing is that there's a base model. Then there's the general parenting that we're saying, like think like a parent would.

15:02And then we give our parents an ability to, we call it like family memory. And they're able to answer questions specifically about like how they would do something. So like how we don't eat beef and pork and my daughter is vegetarian, but struggles with protein. And so that will feel like the personalization or like values. My family values these five values, right? We value adventure. We value community. So anything you suggest comes through the lens of these values. But I just want to frame it. Who trains that thought or whatever you want to call it that my daughter talks to? And that's the tricky space we find ourselves in.

15:38That's what Avni opened up for me on stage. And that's what I heard people talking about in the halls after she spoke. This terrible tension between an AI that can be customized to values, but still somehow adhering to what is known to be true about the world and reality. What I think we want from tools, especially from software, is to simplify our lives. But with something as powerful as AI and something as consequential as the parent-child relationship, it actually requires that we keep our thinking caps on, that we stay very involved and conscientious about the ways that we're using tools and what might be downstream of facilitating certain activities digitally versus the old-fashioned analog way that we were raised.

16:29And that it's on us to notice and measure the impact of what we might be tempted to offload to AI. So many people in tech love the tech as a gadget. And it really physically hurts me because I love the humans. And I want to fight for the humans, which is like you have to live in human pain to build from there. Human relationships are friction by definition, but the goodness lives in the friction. And so if I go talk to, if my daughter talks to the Ba-Bot instead of the Ba, Ba maybe is having a bad day and maybe she'd like brush her off or like whatever else, but that's a human interaction that my daughter now has to learn about, to acknowledge how is your day and things like that.

17:15I think this talk was really a call to noticing, which is something that Danini's talk was also asking us to consider. When does family happen in the course of your day? Like when does intimacy blossom? In what circumstances or conditions are people having the important conversations and interactions that glue them together? Where and how does healthy attachment between parents and kids develop? And if it's happening when you're driving carpool, then you should keep driving carpool. And that's just a stand-in for any number of activities that we might have the option of handing off to, say, AI, which could schedule a Waymo that could take your kids to that baseball game on Thursday.

17:56And the thing that Avni's asking us is, are you sure you want to offload that? But like my speaker Andy Lotz discovered when his young son asked him an extraordinarily deep question while they were sitting in their car at a red light, I always found that I learned so much driving carpool because it gave me comparative data. Like, I just knew my kids. And then when I had a car full of kids, I understood, oh, this is how they talk to each other. This is how much they're on the phones. This is how many of them say please and thank you and how many don't. And it was invaluable for me to know what was reasonable for me to expect of our kids.

18:30And that's just one tiny activity that we could be outsourcing that maybe we shouldn't. Where is our technology, like, where is it removing our ability to be present? Okay, yes, I do appreciate where I'm not going to be maybe lost ever again. But like, yes, sometimes you do want to be lost. That's a values thing. Again, where I'm trying to come to is like, be intentional about what your values are and can your technology, you know, speak to that. That means you have to have long, thoughtful conversations. Thinking back on the process for a moment, we worked for months on her talk. And at first, Avni's instinct was to talk to us as a mother.

19:09And I kept saying, I didn't ask you to come and talk as a mother. I asked you to come and talk as a mother who designs AI products for families. Like you have to bring your professional self to the conversation because that combination of professional and personal experience has given you this set of insights that you're here to share. And it's just such an interesting conversation between the two of us about how an audience would receive her in those two different scenarios. And so when she walked out on stage and gave the talk you just heard, she was totally owning both sides of her identity.

19:43And I think a lot of listeners can relate to this and take inspiration from it. Let me explore that because I think that's where I want to, at least in the next version, try to go take the mundane examples and take them to a more interesting kind of place. I want to share like an example or like a story that I think could have a place, but I'm not sure if it does. We moved down to the Bay and my daughters are 10 and 12. So they had to start new schools in different schools. My youngest is in fifth grade in a new school. Like it's a small community. So all of these kids have known each other since they were fetuses.

20:15And then she found herself like coming into the school. Unbeknownst to us on the first day of school, she hits like extreme anxiety. Like we'll not go in, we'll not do anything. Like just terrified. And just happens on the day where she's like crying and terrified in front of like these peers and like at the door. The problem for me as a parent is that I know and my husband knows that like when she gets there and gets over the anxiety part of it, she's going to enjoy that experience. And she's going to regret that she didn't do it. And so our job is to go figure out how can we find her a way to go do that.

20:44We found a way for her to go. And as I'm dropping her off and driving back, I just had this profound feeling of the person she wanted me to be was not the person she needed me to be. The AI is not going to go do that, right? when i was listening to ovni's talk i kept wondering about the tremendous pressure companies might get from venture capitalists and other investors to bypass some of the subtle elements of product design that she wants and needs to blend into the offerings of her company and instead just remove all the friction that ovni talked about and i think it just puts front and center the idea of the profit motive and getting real about this terrible truth.

21:29Whatever makes money will be made. Whether it's good for society or not, people will make anything that makes money. There are enough people who are not reluctant in any way to add something to society that will enrich themselves, that is utterly unhealthy, and will ultimately lead to tremendous dips and well-being for individuals, while also enriching the companies who make these products. There's no question that this is our history, and it's a byproduct of capitalism. I think that's the idea, which is like, how could you use the power? Again, this is where I do take this from, like, I understand how the world works.

22:07It's why I'm trying to do this via a VC-backed company, because I understand the power of capitalism. But what if we could put the power of capitalism to create a different type of technology that allows us to choose our value set. And yes, it might be, I mean, almost certainly it is harder than the set path. But I think that's what, for me, gives us this long-term optimism because it is not inevitable. This technology is not inevitable. There's no value judgment innate in the technology except for the people who are making the choices against which value sets. And I think, again, this is a conversation you and I have had, which is like, For me, the issue is the presumption of values on behalf of everyone.

22:53And that, I think, is an issue. And feeling pessimistic that anything could be stronger than the market or the profit motive. Like, that's where I get to is like, are we, is that what we're counting on? That, like, enough people are like, yes, I know I could make a fortune here, but I'm not going to. And all this pushes a very basic question, which is extremely relevant to parenting and AI. Why do we just let the market decide? Or are we beholden at some other level to develop and provide products that are both what the customer believes they want enough to buy it, but that we know will be ultimately good for the things that we say we value as a society, like strong families?

23:36To me, that is a million-dollar question. And that makes me think, will some company that is just giving customers whatever they want without a second thought to what's good for all, will they beat Avni's company? Will they make 10 times the money of Avni's company? Will they move 10 times faster into the space because they're not worrying themselves with these larger questions? Because they're not getting hung up or slowed down by avoiding the same mistakes of, say, social media? I mean, these forces will never die and they will create fertile soil for certain kinds of products. And unfortunately, that means we, as the customers, have to be super vigilant.

24:15We cannot defer. And that is a heavy, very grown-up thought to live with. And a weight that I am feeling as I reflect back on Ted and my work with six phenomenal speakers you are hearing from this week. The meta point I want to make is that care is love and care is work. So it's the two things I hold to be true, I believe to be true, is that these are acts of service that do not need to be outsourced. You know, the soccer email that comes in, right? There is a lot of stuff that goes into that, like the snacks and like thinking about the kids eating, like what would they enjoy and all that stuff.

24:47But if you take a look at that soccer email that comes in and the 20 families that then have to transcribe that into a calendar, that like, you know, we don't need a human to be doing that like 20 times over. Right. So where do we look at the work and are able to support it in a way and honor the work? I think that's the biggest question. That's a conversation that's really worth having. And that's the whole point of a TED Talk, to start a conversation worth having. Avni, you did it. Thank you so much for every one of those insane versions, the ride you took me on. And then you got out there and you killed it.

25:25So thanks a lot. I mean, thank you for having the belief to pluck me out, to believe that it was in there and to push me like a good mama and would do.

25:42That's it for today. Come back tomorrow when we share what I think of as the most unusual and spectacular TED Talk I have ever heard by a guy from Dublin named Duncan Keegan. TED Talks Daily is a part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and mixed by Lucy Little, edited by Alejandra Salazar, and fact-checked by the TED Research Team. The TED Talks Daily team includes Martha Estafanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, and Tansika Sungmar Nivong. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Belarezo. I'm Kelly Corrigan, guest host of TED Talks Daily, here for a special week where we're taking a deep dive into the topic of AI and family life.

26:34Also, please join me at my podcast, Kelly Corrigan Wonders, wherever you listen to podcasts. I'll be back tomorrow. Thanks for listening.

26:51okay so let's pause here because um boy we could just talk all day long okay and i'm a little whipped up i need like a cup of tea i know exactly i'm like you just walked past and