Meet Espa, a fresh take on AI assistants

Hello again, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In. When the software engineer and entrepreneur Deon Nicholas was CEO of Forethought, a customer service automation platform, he had an executive assistant to manage the minutiae of his workday. Not surprisingly, he appreciated the help. “That was something that I found was critical, something that actually helped me as a leader,” he explains. Few of us who aren’t in the executive suite have the luxury of calling on another person to wrangle our schedule, triage email, and otherwise keep the chaos of our professional and personal lives under control. As Nicholas contemplated the frenzy of excitement over AI agents, it occurred to him: Maybe AI was capable of democratizing the kind of assistance he’d found so valuable. “Having an AI executive assistant is actually the kind of thing that can bridge that gap for people to see what’s possible in agentic AI, and possibly impact billions and billions of people,” he says, listing “journalists, realtors, creators, artists, and athletes” among the possible users for such a product. Working with Volodymyr Lyubinets, his fellow cofounder at Forethought—which was acquired by Zendesk in March—he founded a company called Espa Labs to build it. Their startup’s offering, also called Espa, launched last week, starting at $25 a month or $240 a year, with a free one-week trial. Now, there’s nothing radical about the notion of using AI to automate everyday tasks and calling the results an “assistant.” Countless other products have done that, from Siri to OpenClaw. But having used Nicholas’s brainchild for a week, I’ve found it to be fresh, intriguing, and, most important, useful—and yes, it feels a little like having a trusty human helper on call. The first thing that surprised me about this app is that it isn’t an app. Once I’d connected Espa to Gmail and Google Calendar and answered a few questions about how I planned to use it, all of my interactions were via messag